Paving The Way
by Jack Wednesday
Summary: Not everyone appreciates the Powerpuff Girls.
1. Default Chapter

Paving the Way

Part 1

There is a place on the outskirts of the city of Townsville that very few people ever visit. Talk to people who have passed by there and they will tell you in a low voice that there is an _atmosphere_, and will cast you a knowing, chilling glance before passing rapidly to another subject. To walk there is to feel that strange sensation of pressure on the back of the neck that seems to suggest that someone else is present, watching, yet no one is ever there. The damp ivy that crawls over blackened and long forgotten walls seems to mutter as you pass. In the dank gloom beneath the tall trees, black, fluttering shapes dart and mock at the corners of your vision. Unnerved by the silence, you find yourself holding your breath, aware of the thumping of your own heart. Is it the sound of footsteps catching at the long grass that you can hear, over there, footsteps that seem to be receding into the distance, inviting you to follow? Is that a voice, whispering so softly, drawing nearer? You smile and tell yourself that you are imagining things, that you are spooking yourself, that there really isn't someone standing just behind you, that that sensation isn't really their hot breath caressing your ear. A bead of sweat trickles uncomfortably down your back. With sudden decision, you turn, muscles tense and every nerve in your body steeled to face whatever it is that dogs your footsteps, your eyes half-closed against the horror that awaits you. But there is nothing there, just a curious, faint, stertorous breathing sound, as of someone chuckling to themselves. A wave of icy cold falls through you body as you realise that it is _your_ breath, that that low, manic giggling is coming from your own mouth. You run. And when someone asks you about this place, you tell them there's an _atmosphere_, and talk about something else. 

In the middle of this tangle of ugly weeds and brooding evergreens, hidden from casual passers-by - of which there are none - there is a large, old house. Had you the nerve to walk a little further, you might have seen it, a great, grey, granite monolith of a place, its walls spattered with orange lichen and festooned with a lank, sickly pungent creeper. You might be forgiven for thinking that no-one lives here, for the wide steps that lead up to the impressive portico are carpeted with damp, autumnal leaves, and the paintwork is split and peeling, but the house is inhabited. Very few of the residents of Townsville have met the owner of this desolate estate, but many have encountered him without their knowing it. No one knows his name, although many think they may have heard it somewhere else, and instead this curious individual is known merely as 'Him'.

This creature, this 'Him', is reclusive. He rarely strays beyond the enormous, black, iron-studded front door that stares out the last vestiges of courage from anyone brave or foolish enough to venture near the house. He is unassuming and quiet, although there have been reports of the sepulchral sound of a voice speaking in a strange tongue echoing from the house on some dark nights. Perhaps it is this reclusiveness, this being wrapped in a private world day in and day out, that has warped him, or perhaps terrible experiences have torn and savaged his mind, until it resembles nothing that the citizens of Townsville, or you, or I, could recognise. Or perhaps there really is such a thing as Evil that sits hobgoblin-like in the twisted soul of this creature.

Just because his heart is cold and his soul empty, does not mean that this Being, this 'citizen' of Townsville, is stupid: far from it. He is subtle, clever and devious; he is knowledgeable, an intellectual even, and could, if put to it, be a fine conversationalist. But he is not interested in conversation; he is interested in power, and power of a very particular kind. Many times he has sought that power, and many times the other citizens of Townsville have called upon a wonderful and strange force, the diminutive trio known as the Powerpuff Girls, to protect themselves. There was a time when it seemed that all Him's cunning and deceit was forever condemned to achieve naught because of this protective power; but that all changed recently.

It was on a cold and bleak December evening that events began to unfold which would overturn Townsville's cosy assumption of invulnerability. Anyone that ever penetrated to the inside of Him's brooding abode would be shocked by the contrast with the neglected exterior. The rooms were fresh and clean, their paintwork shining and smooth, comfortably but not extravagantly furnished with a wide range of _objets_ from many cultures and many ages. One curious feature of these rooms was that each was decorated in a single colour: one purest white, another green, yet another yellow, and so on, with stained glass at the windows to emphasise the effect. Some of the rooms could almost be described as beautiful, some even scented with fresh flowers. There was one room, however, that did not quite fit this pattern. Up a great polished mahogany staircase and through a small antechamber, one came to a large room with a huge gothic stone fireplace; in this room, there was not one but two dominant colours, red and black. The window was stained blood red and the shades upon the lamps were of a similar hue; ancient oak furniture, blackened with age, stood upon a rich crimson carpet; black velvet drapes covered the walls and black candles flickered and guttered on the stone mantelpiece; menacing, angular bronzes glowered from antique tables and cupboards. It was in this room on the December night in question that the creature known as Him sat before the glowing embers of a dying fire, his face illuminated only by that glow and by the faint light from two candles on the mantelpiece. He sat motionless for many minutes, deep in thought, perhaps watching images in the glowing coals, then leant back, causing the great, carved oak chair in which he was sitting to creak slightly. 

'Well, well!' His voice fell dead against the plush furnishings. Turning to his left, he reached out with a languorous arm and picked up a small, grotesque bronze statue from a side table. 'What are we to make of this, Grimblekin?' he continued, addressing the bronze, 'Another year gone, and nothing to show for it. Are the citizens of Townsville now incorruptible, I wonder?' 

His voice was level and quiet, almost mellifluous. He held the bronze, a crooked, hideous abomination of horns and teeth and hair that seemed to have pain and cruelty in every hooked lineament, before his face. 'Oh, Grimblekin, what a virtuous city! What faithful, thoughtful, honourable, trustworthy people. A place of such love and peace. Look!'

As he uttered this last word, he waved his right hand – or, rather, _claw_ – in the direction of the fireplace and in response there was a brightening and then a sudden flaring of the fire, the renewed brightness sending shadows dancing on the velvet walls. After a few moments, a pattern became distinguishable in the flames and a moving picture began to form: slowly, houses and people began to be recognisable. It was a suburban street in Townsville. It might have been summer, for there were children riding bicycles and playing with garden hoses, and men and women cleaning cars and mowing lawns and tending barbecues.

'Look, Grimblekin,' said Him, still clutching the bronze, 'See the happy neighbours! There's Mrs. Grey, in her lovely garden smiling across at Mr. Green, and there's Mr. Green waving and smiling back from his front room. What could be lovelier? Except that you and I know that Mrs. Grey detests the Greens' children for running across her lawn and damaging her roses, and that she's thought of poisoning their dog for the same reason. And that Mr. Green day-dreams violent confrontations with Mr. Grey, his boss, in which he smashes Mr. Grey's face against the corner of a desk.'

Him paused to look at the scene once more.

'Shall we go next door?' he asked of the evil-looking statuette. 'No, there's just the same story. Let us elevate our gaze!'

By subtle degrees, the picture in the flames began to mutate and distort, and bit by bit another view formed, that of a richly furnished office. A large, leather-topped desk stood before a bookcase, and sitting at the desk in a high-backed leather chair was a short, balding man wearing a monocle and sporting an impressive white moustache. 

'Ah!' exclaimed Him, 'The _Mayor_. A veritable city institution, after all these years. A simple fellow, of course. Not the brightest button in the box, but loved and trusted by his public. "He is a little slow, and a little stuck in his ways, but one feels that Townsville is in safe hands whilst he is at the helm." Dear old Mayor. You've been paying out those cheques now every month for fourteen years and no one suspects a thing! How can a man of your limited talents have managed such creative accountancy, I wonder? Dear me, those _nasty_ photographs! What a pity that private detective you hired to _sort things_ _out_ turned out to be such a scoundrel! _Two_ cheques a month now! I wonder who gave you his name? Why of course! How could I forget the ever loyal and forthright Ms. Sara Bellum?'

The scene in the flames changed once again. A view of a schoolroom gradually formed itself from the flickering orange glow. On the walls of this room, there were drawings obviously made by young children, together with some posters and a montage of photographs. The room was filled with dozens of desks and chairs arranged rather roughly into rows, but there were no children there, just one woman, aged probably in her early thirties, sitting at a desk marking books.

'We get closer, Grimblekin,' remarked Him, 'The lovely Ms. Keane, to whom the citizens of Townsville entrust their dear children. What a charming person! Kind, considerate, honest, she not only educates but instils in each new generation the virtues of compassion and tolerance. What's that?'

Him lifted the bronze statuette to his ear, and made a pretence of listening carefully.

'Shame upon you Grimblekin!' he grinned, 'Bringing up that reprimand, raking over an issue long forgotten! Anyone can lose their temper. Personally, I think the parents over-reacted. Dear Ms. Keane has made a fresh start in Townsville, and we must give her the benefit of the doubt.'

He chuckled as the picture in the flame altered again.

'Professor Utonium,' he said, as the hazy image gradually settled into shape, 'a man of learning, a man of science. A positive Renaissance Man, his talents run from genetics and biochemistry to electronics and mechanics. Science is the Ultimate Truth, is it not, and a man like the Professor is not one to be turned from the truth. Ethics committees? What do they know? A bunch of meddlesome outsiders who do not appreciate the value of one's work. Besides, what were those animals bred for? Certain sacrifices have to be made on the way to the Truth, for the common good. Besides, now that those experiments are done, the Professor has become a staunch supporter of the anti-vivisection movement. You will remember the speech in which he was most scathing of those who - what was it? – had not "the humility to see the moral equality of humans and animals nor the wit to devise experiments that avoided inflicting suffering upon sentient creatures". As for those germ warfare experiments, well, they happened before the Professor was born, and he is horrified by them. He just made use of the results, that's all. Better surely, that the men did not die in vain, that some good might come from their suffering.'

With a broad grin on his face, Him leant back in his chair once more, and the flames in the fireplace subsided, and the shadows stopped their jig on the walls.

'There is so much potential here, Grimblekin,' he said, quietly, 'Give me a day uninterrupted with the good people of Townsville and I would strip away the thin veneer of civilisation and expose these people for what they really are: creatures just like me! Make no mistake, it requires very little to turn these humans into monsters. It is their natural state. Look around the world and what do you see? Mass graves. Torture chambers. People hacked to pieces. People mutilated. The incoherent violence of the mob. I don't ask much, Grimblekin. I just want these things for _my_ little town. You see I'm really very public spirited!' 

He threw back his head and began to laugh hysterically, but then, in a sudden, horrifying instant, his mood changed, his face contorting with rage and his claw slamming in anger against the arm of the chair.

'But what keeps these people from their true state, from their true nature?' he roared, 'Conscience? Do you think it's conscience, Grimblekin? The only thing that keeps these people from the depravities they long for is the fear that they have too much to lose. Fear that what they have will be taken from them. And who will take it from them? The Powerpuff Girls!'

He spat out these last three words, the name of his fiercest enemies, as if the taste of them passing his lips was that of bitter poison.

'Always they are in my way! Always doing good. Always bringing _justice'_ – he sneered the word – 'and righting wrongs. Well your Good is my Evil! Your Justice is my Injustice!' His voice rose to a crescendo of anger. 'Your Right is my WRONG!' 

Thud! Thud! The two halves of Grimblekin fell to the floor. In his excitement, Him had sliced the statue in two with his claw. 

'Well, well!' The anger had receded from Him's voice. 'Poor Grimblekin!' He stared down sadly at the two parts of the statue for a few moments, until slowly and unexpectedly a smile began to spread over his face. He leant back in his seat and began to chuckle. 

'Yes! Yes!' His chuckling became increasingly hysterical, and he hugged himself with excitement. 'Oh little Powerpuff girls, you are so good, so very _very_ good!' 


	2. Part 2

Part 2

It was Arts and Crafts hour at Pokey Oaks Kindergarten, situated in one of the nicer suburbs of Townsville. This was one of the more enjoyable parts of the day for Ms. Keane. She always delighted in the looks of concentration and enjoyment on the faces of the children, and she never had to pretend to like the work they produced, regardless of how strange, indecipherable, funny, even laughable, it was. No matter how much she believed in the value of education – and she was as committed now as she had been as an idealistic and perhaps over-zealous student in her first year at college – no matter how much she believed in it as the most basic, most important Human Right, the Right, indeed, upon which all others were founded, she never could quite suppress a feeling of slight sadness when she watched the faces of some of the slower kids during spelling or arithmetic classes. Still, there were some children that it was ever a joy to teach. Ms. Keane was fortunate enough to have in her class the three Powerpuff sisters, three girls that almost represented a teacher's prayer come true. How else could you describe three children that loved coming to school, that participated with enthusiasm in all subjects, that were kind and considerate beyond their years to their classmates and their teacher? Even here, though, there was a tinge of sadness. The girls had been attending Ms. Keane's kindergarten class now for seven years. Make no mistake, they were bright children: Buttercup was a little inattentive, and too prone to get annoyed when she got things wrong, but she was a good kid; Blossom was the opposite, patient, attentive, hard-working and clearly the most mature of the sisters; Bubbles, in some ways, was the most curious of the three, dizzy, absent-minded, dreamy, imaginative, inclined to be over-sensitive and over-emotional, but also, so Ms. Keane had observed, possibly the cleverest of the three, if she only chose to put her mind to it. The fact was, though, that bright as they were, these three little girls would never leave Pokey Oaks in the normal way, a fact that Ms. Keane had accepted with mixed emotions. Their 'father' – a rather loose term, given the circumstances of their 'birth' - Professor Utonium, had explained it to her once in some mind-boggling scientific jargon, but it boiled down to this: he had created three kindergarten girls and kindergarten girls is what they were destined to remain, indefinitely. That was the sad part. On the other hand, Ms. Keane had never had to deal with three such happy and well-adjusted children, and any concerns she might have in the privacy of her apartment melted away each morning at the sight of their smiling faces.

If there was one feature of having the Powerpuff Girls in her class that Ms. Keane did not like, it was the presence of a small toy-like telephone that stood on a table in a back corner of the classroom. This innocuous-looking object was in fact no toy, but the 'hot-line', a direct connection to the office of the mayor. If an emergency threatened Townsville – and there were a surprising number of emergencies – this phone would ring to summon the help of the Girls. And indeed, just as the class had settled down with their drawing materials, this was precisely what happened.

Ms. Keane was walking from desk to desk, encouraging and assisting the children, when suddenly, from the back of the room, there came the piercing beep-beep of the phone, causing her to let out a small exclamation and put her hand to her breast in an involuntary gesture of surprise. She could never get used to that thing! In a movement so swift that it left a residual pink streak for a fraction of a second across the vision of all those that saw it, Blossom leapt from her seat and flew across the room to pick up the receiver before the second beep had even finished.

'Yes, Mayor?' The other children watched in awe, their crayons and cardboard forgotten, as Blossom answered the tinny yet distinctive voice that could just be discerned coming from the telephone earpiece. 'A robbery at First Townsville Bank? We're right on it!'

Blossom slammed down the phone.

'Girls! Lets go!' she called.

In a flash of green, pink and blue, and with a crash and a fall of plaster, the three sisters exited from the room by the quickest means at their disposal – through the ceiling. Ms. Keane had been trying for most of the time that the Powerpuff Girls had been in her class to dissuade them from this ostentatious means of egress, but little girls are apt to get over-excited, and when those little girls are in possession of super powers a certain amount of incidental damage is to be expected. By now, of course, the class was in uproar, and Ms. Keane let out a resigned sigh, aware that she would be unable to settle the children for the rest of the morning.

Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup soared into a cloudless blue sky. Buttercup took the lead, pleased that they had finally received a call after more than a week without any emergencies, pleased at the prospect of action again. Much as she enjoyed the classes at Pokey Oaks, it was against her nature to be confined to a classroom. Stuck too long at a desk, she could become restive and irritable, and these crises, both large and small, no matter how terrifying they could sometimes be to the average citizen, were curiously soothing and relaxing to her. She also took a quiet delight in the fact that she and her sisters were special and could bust out of class whenever that little phone rang. Bringing up the rear, Bubbles, in her typical daydreamy way, was still thinking about the crepe-paper collage she was making in class and followed her sisters automatically, not even pausing in her thoughts to consider the mission she was on. In some ways, she was very dependent upon them. Her sisters gave structure to her life. She never had to worry what they were going to do, what games to play, what tactics to adopt against the criminals and monsters that it was their everyday task to battle. Blossom and Buttercup, sometimes acrimoniously, would make the decisions and Bubbles was happy to tag along. Whether this was simply in her nature, or whether this trait had become self-reinforcing, was difficult to say. Ms. Keane had, on a number of occasions, tried in a gentle way to see if she could interrupt what she worried was a cycle of psychological dependence, but the girls were inseparable from one another, and given the circumstances of their lives and of their future she had never had the heart to push too hard. Besides, it was not clear at all that this dependence was a one-way transaction. That Bubbles had a tendency to follow her sisters, figuratively speaking, was obvious to all, and outwardly it appeared that she brought very little to the relationship between the three of them; yet Ms. Keane was an experienced and astute enough teacher to realise that the two apparently stronger girls would be equally lost if they were to be parted from their sensitive sibling. 

Blossom, like Buttercup, was pleased to be at work again. She loved school, and often went to sleep at night excited by the prospect of the following day's lessons, but it was these missions, when she and her sisters set out to rid Townsville of evil, that truly made her feel alive. There was something almost cosseting about the knowledge that the people of Townsville needed her help, a warm sensation that radiated from the city not so much of love – although there was certainly an element of that in there – but of gratitude and the understanding that she and her sisters were performing an invaluable task that only they were capable of. It could be quite a heady feeling, especially after a lengthy break, as now, and it produced in Blossom an overwhelming desire to immerse herself in the job completely, to the exclusion of everything else, almost to the point where she and it were one and the same. As she savoured the refreshing chill of the morning air high above the city, Blossom found herself reflecting on these emotions, and it occurred to her that it must have been some similar sentiment that had prompted Buttercup to give up washing and bathing for a week or two, a few months back. She smiled with new understanding at her sister, streaking ahead with her customary enthusiasm. For a second or two, Blossom was almost overcome by a tremendous feeling of safety and warmth, but a small, incessant itch at the back of her mind brought her out of her reverie and she called out to Buttercup.

'Stop!'

Buttercup turned in mid-flight, a manoeuvre that generated G-forces that would have crushed an ordinary mortal.

'What is it?' she snapped, annoyed that her own thoughts had been interrupted in this way.

'We've got to be careful,' replied Blossom, 'If we just go crashing in there someone could get hurt. Let's see what's happening first.'

As one, the three girls each directed a piercing stare at the roof of the First Townsville Bank, located some hundreds of feet below them. With a little effort on their part, rather akin to trying to focus on a distant object, layers of the bank's structure began to fade away before their eyes. First the tiles on the roof became glassy and transparent, revealing a jumble of stationery and obsolete office equipment stored in the bank's attic, then a ceiling faded to disclose people seated in offices, then, finally, a floor miraculously melted away to show the scene in the bank's main hall. It was immediately apparent that something extraordinary was happening. The bank's customers, perhaps a dozen people, were lying face down on the floor. The counter staff were standing in a line, their hands in the air. Someone, possibly the manager, was taking money from the small vault behind the counter and placing it in a nylon sports bag. Standing just inside the main doors was a man holding a pump-action shotgun, its barrel aimed at the terrified people cowering on the floor.

'Let's get him!' said a frowning Buttercup.

'Wait! By the time we've broken in he could have shot someone!' said Blossom, also frowning in her attempt to devise a suitable plan of action.

'No he won't,' replied Buttercup, irritated, 'We just bust through the door and he won't know what's hit him!'

'Oh no!' squeaked Bubbles, the only one of the three sisters who was still watching the robbery unfold below, 'Look! He's taken someone hostage!'

Blossom and Buttercup redirected their attention to the bank. The quivering manager, with her legs clearly about to buckle beneath her, had approached the robber to hand over the bag of money, only to have the shotgun held to her head.

'OK, Blossom, what're we gonna do now?' snapped Buttercup, adding, under her breath, 'If we'd just gone in there, it'd all be over now.'

'Wait for him to come out,' said Blossom, with new determination in her voice now that she had thought of a plan, 'Bubbles, you go and clear the street. Get everybody out of the way.'

In a blue flash, Bubbles was gone, hurtling towards the ground.

'Buttercup,' continued Blossom, 'as soon as he comes out, you break in through the back of the bank. I'll distract him and you snatch the gun away from behind.'

'Got it!' Buttercup shot away in a blaze of green.

Blossom flew down to street level. Already, Bubbles had done her job and there was no-one to be seen. Positioning herself across the road from the bank, just opposite the large glass doors, Blossom waited, hovering some fifteen feet or so above the ground. She did not have to wait long. Within a few seconds, the robber appeared, backing through the doors, one arm around the manager's neck and the other still aiming the shotgun at the woman's head. He shouted something at the people in the bank and turned around, in a violent gesture that almost wrenched the manager off her feet. She let out a little scream and Blossom shouted, fearing for the woman's safety.

'Put the gun down!'

A fleeting look of confusion passed across the man's face, as he attempted to locate the source of this imperious command. He had not noticed, nor expected to see, the strange-looking red-haired little girl hovering at first-floor level across the street. It was a moment's loss of concentration that Blossom had hoped for.

'You keep back or she…'

The man's hoarse, angry and possibly frightened words were cut short abruptly by an enormous crash and a spray of glass fragments as something like a green thunderbolt erupted from the bank behind him. He did not have the slightest chance to react to what happened next, and indeed it was only the three little sisters who could even follow the action. Passing at lightning speed, Buttercup grabbed the barrel of the shotgun and wrenched it both away from the bank manager's head and out of the robber's hand. The gun went off with a loud bang, the shot flying harmlessly into the air. Even before the befuddled robber had had a chance to close his eyes in autonomic response to the gun's report, Bubbles had burst out from behind a parked car to snatch the manager away to safety. Whether the robber felt or even knew anything about what happened next is debatable, for Blossom crossed the street in an instant and dealt the man such a blow that he was hurled bodily through the air to smash in a sickening crunch of breaking bones against the rusticated sandstone wall of the bank. His limp body fell to the pavement.

The air filled with a cacophony of wailing sirens as police cars and ambulances rushed to the scene. Shocked, dazed and greatly relieved people began to emerge from the bank. Allowed to come forward now, a crowd began to gather, and reporters and TV cameramen jostled one another for prime position. Into the middle of this melee, waved through by the policemen who were attempting to keep order, swept a limousine, which pulled up at the kerb by the entrance to the bank and was immediately surrounded by a crush of photographers. After a couple of cops had cleared enough space for the door to be opened, out stepped the Mayor, never one to miss an opportunity to be in the limelight, followed by his personal assistant, Sara Bellum. With four or five cops pushing back the crowd, he climbed the steps of the bank and turned to address the Powerpuff Girls – and the reporters.

'Girls,' he announced, with one eye on the little sisters and one on the TV cameras, 'I'd like to thank you for again helping to prevent a serious crime. As soon as I received the report from police headquarters, I realised the gravity of the situation and the potential that existed for a dangerous hostage crisis. As you know,' he continued, with a true politician's talent for gathering all the kudos for himself, 'it is the proud boast of the present Administration that violent crime has been virtually eliminated in Townsville, and today's events will serve as a timely warning to all criminals that their presence will not be tolerated within my… our city limits.'

Turning directly to the TV cameras, the Mayor continued.

'I would like to announce today that as a mark of the City's appreciation for their assistance, and of my personal respect for them, the Powerpuff Girls will receive the Freedom of the City of Townsville in a ceremony to take place, er… Saturday.'

There was wild applause from the crowd.

'Thank you, Mayor,' chorused the Powerpuff Girls, in unison.

Sara Bellum, a tall lady who towered above the diminutive figure of the Mayor, leant forward.

'Thinking on your feet again, Mayor?' she whispered, dryly, 'There's no such thing as the "Freedom of the City".'

'I've just instituted it,' replied the Mayor, quietly, through the toothy smile he was still presenting to the crowd and the cameras, 'See if you can get a presentation key or something made up. And try to get the national media involved. Try selling it to them that the Girls are the youngest people ever to receive the freedom of a city.'

'Are they?' asked Sara, unimpressed.

'Who cares? Tell them I'm available for comment at any time. Now,' - he addressed the reporters again - 'shall we have some pictures of me with the Girls?'


	3. Part 3

Part 3

Friday night saw the Gangreen Gang kicking their heels in the tumbledown shack that passed for their 'hideout', situated amongst rancid piles of garbage down at the Townsville Dump. Now, the five members of this gang - Ace, Snake, Grubber, Big Billy and Little Arturo - particularly Ace, their leader, rather fancied themselves as leading buccaneer lives of excitement and adventure beyond the reach of the law. They certainly considered themselves greatly superior to the ordinary, law-abiding residents of the City, whom they despised for their boring, humdrum suburban lives. Yet it was remarkable how many evenings found them, as now, playing cards and getting slowly drunk and slowly stoned in a ramshackle timber hut furnished with nothing more than a rusting stove, a deal table and five rickety chairs saved from a bonfire. 

A feeble, flickering light from the flames just visible through the grille at the front of the stove added its contribution to that of the paraffin lamp that hung over the table. The air in the hut was fetid and over heated, the cracked chimney of the stove adding a steady stream of wood smoke to the fug, and the card game was being played in a depressing silence punctuated only occasionally by giggling from Little Arturo, who had been partaking rather too heavily of the spliff that was being passed around the table.

'Hey Ace' sniggered Arturo as Snake dealt a new hand, 'are we going to this presentation tomorrow?' 

'Yeah, Boss, can we go?' The dull, heavy voice that thundered across the card table was that of Big Billy. 'There's gonna be a carnival and fairground rides and everything.' 

'Yessss,' hissed Snake, dealing out the last card and reaching for his can of beer, 'can we goesss?' 

The four subordinate gang members looked pleadingly at Ace, who was leaning back against the wall of the hut, his chair propped on its two rear legs. He belched.

'What?' he sneered, scrutinising each of them in turn through half-open eyes, 'You creeps wanna go and watch the Powerpuff Girls get a medal? You wanna see the sworn enemies of the Gangreen Gang given the freedom of the City of Townsville?' 

There was silence.

'Dontcha think you'd choke on your ice cream, Billy?' he added, contemptuously.

'Gee Boss, I just thought…'

'You just leave the thinking to me, _Billy_.' It was a laughably clichéd thing to say, but no-one made a sound, such was the vehemence with which Ace spat out the words. 'Geez, it makes me sick,' he continued, in the same vein, 'I'd like to put a bomb under the whole f***ing lot of 'em and blow 'em to Kingdom Come! Freedom of Townsville! The Powerpuff Girls have already got the freedom of the city – freedom to kick our asses!'

To emphasise his point, Ace kicked the table, sending cards, poker chips and beer cans flying.

'Gee, Boss!' moaned the dim-witted Billy, with an almost comically hurt expression on his face. The others joined in a chorus of whining.

'Shaddup!' shouted Ace, 'You know what I'd do if I had the Freedom of Townsville? I'd kick you morons out of town, that's what!'

'We're sorry, Ace,' piped up Little Arturo, 'We don't want to go to the presentation. We want to stay here with you.'

It was the wrong thing to say.

'What?' exclaimed Ace, leaning forward and bringing his chair back onto all four feet with a crash. He leapt up, but somehow got caught between the table and his chair and ended up kicking the chair across the room in frustration, so hard that it broke. 'You think I wanna spend my Saturday hanging out with a bunch of freakin' losers like you?'

He stormed across the hut and flung open the door as if to leave, letting in a freezing draught of night air, but as he crossed the threshold something made him stop and turn, and he looked back. Like lost puppies, Snake, Arturo, Billy and Grubber were watching him, their plaintive faces miserable almost to the point of tears.

For a moment, Ace stood looking at them with the same expression of disdain, almost of disgust, that had been the most noteworthy characteristic of his face all evening. Then, suddenly, a sort of convulsion or spasm swept over his features and he lashed out, striking the door frame so hard that the whole creaky hut shuddered, so hard that his knuckles began to bleed. For a second or two, he stood with his eyes closed and his fist still pressing against the woodwork, his forehead resting on the door frame. Then, slowly, he opened his eyes and looked dispassionately at his battered hand. With a sigh, he glanced at the others.

'Well, what the hell're you doing sitting there?' he asked, in a calm and level voice, 'C'mon. Let's get outta here and do something destructive with the evening.' 

It was a moment almost of poignancy. The relief of the other gang members was almost palpable. Another storm had passed. They were used to Ace's moods, in much the same way as they were used to the weather. There was nothing they could do about either; nor did they understand what caused the wind to blow first one way and then the other, and to change with such speed and violence. They were used to it; but, like the ancient Aztecs, they had always a lingering fear that one day their particular sun would not rise again. Ace was the one solid, unquestioned point of reference in their lives, the one thing that gave each of them a tenuous hold on a bewildering and inimical Reality. The thought that one day he might leave was as terrible to them as was that ancient fear to the Aztecs, and they were willing to make a similar level of sacrifice to ensure that it didn't happen. With some alacrity, and with their faces now lit up with smiles, they followed Ace out of the hut.

It was a clear, frosty night, and a light mist was creeping over Townsville Dump, its long, clammy fingers probing between the heaps of rubbish as the gang began to walk towards the city. Their spirits were much higher now, and a lively conversation centred around what each of them would do if given the Freedom of the City, which they seemed to equate in some way to being given the power to do absolutely as they pleased within the city limits. 

Townsville was not a City That Never Slept. On the contrary, very few places were open much beyond eleven at night and the streets were largely deserted as the Gangreen Gang headed downtown. In order to reach the subway that would take them into the city centre, where they knew a couple of disreputable bars that would still be open, they had to pass through some of the sprawling suburbs, and they contrived to do this making as much noise as possible, shouting and kicking cans and calling out names to any of the good folk of Townsville who stuck their heads out of their windows to complain. Feeling the effects of earlier beer consumption, and urged on by Ace, Grubber, who needed very little encouragement in the first place, relieved himself to much merriment in one of the gardens that they passed. This went on in much the same way for a mile or two, each gang member trying to outdo the others in mischief making, and dustbins were overturned, car tyres let down and a child's bicycle, inopportunely left lying on a driveway, was flung into a stream. It was a kind of ritual, the gang pulling itself together again, that went on until Ace suddenly called an abrupt halt. He had caught sight of a large rectangular sign positioned in front of a low, flat-roofed building. 

'Well, Well! Pokey Oaks Kindergarten,' crowed Ace, reading the sign out loud. 'You know, it would be really nice to see what those darling little Powerpuff Girls get up to all day. Whadda you say, guys?' 

'That would be real nice, Ace,' sniggered the gang with one voice. 

Pokey Oaks had no alarm system. Who would imagine that a kindergarten could be a target for crime, least of all the kindergarten attended by the Powerpuff Girls? The gang broke into the classroom with ease, through a window at the rear. Inside, they found the room illuminated by orange light streaming in from a nearby street, and they could easily see the children's drawings pinned to the wall, the chairs and desks neatly stacked and tidied for the weekend, the boxes of toys and games, the shelves of books and the row of little lockers arranged along one wall, each one marked in best schoolteacher handwriting with the name of one of the pupils. Like a kid in a candy store, Ace scarcely knew where to begin. His first impulse was simply to begin kicking the chairs and desks, but that seemed too simple, too crude. Instead, suppressing this instinct, he inspected the lockers individually, until he came upon one marked "Blossom". 

'Billy,' he called, 'open this will you.' 

The locker was designed for five-year-old use, not for security, and with what amounted, for him, to a gentle tap, Billy wrenched the door open. 

'Well, what have we here?' mocked Ace, as he pulled out the contents. 'What's this? "Conversational Chinese - a Primer". Grubber, you look like a man who needs to brush up his Chinese. Maybe you can do something with this?' 

He tossed the book to Grubber, who immediately began tearing out the pages and eating them. The others chortled. 

'Hm! Not much else in here, just some work books,' continued Ace, throwing the slim books one by one onto the floor. "My! Look at all the gold stars in here! Snake,' he called, 'why don't you _enlighten_ us all with the contents of these wonderful books?' 

Sniggering, Snake caught the drift of Ace's words. He held one of the books at arm's length and, pulling a cheap disposable lighter from his pocket, set fire to one corner. He held on until the heat became uncomfortable, then dropped the book to the floor and kicked Blossom's other books on top so as to create a small bonfire. Ace, meanwhile, got Billy to break into the locker marked "Bubbles". 

'Crayons!' he exclaimed, 'Now, Billy, an artist like you could really do with some good drawing material, right?' 

Unlike Snake, Big Billy required some prompting. Ace whispered a few words in his ear, and Billy's face lit up. 

'Billy do graffiti!' he exclaimed, and lumbered off with the crayons to begin writing the words "Miss Keane stinks, signed Bubbles" on the wall, in a spidery handwriting very appropriate to the location, grinding the wax into the paintwork as hard as he could. 

'Hey, Snake, the fire's going out,' said Ace, 'Lucky there's these drawings!' 

With that, he pulled a handful of Bubbles' treasured paintings from the locker and threw them on to the flames.

'Help yourselves, guys,' he added, with a dismissive wave towards the lockers, bored now with this game.

As the others began breaking into the lockers and strewing the contents around the room, Ace looked for something else to do. He found it on a table in a corner: a small clear plastic box with wood shavings lining the bottom. Twiggy, the class hamster, was sleeping peacefully within. Sleeping, that is, until the box was hurled to the floor and shattered into a dozen pieces. The poor little dazed creature scuttled out from the wreckage, and the sight of it seemed to enrage Ace. With an almost maniacal frenzy, jumping from place to place, he attempted to stamp on the animal as it started to run to and fro looking desperately for hiding place. Several times, Twiggy came within a hair's breadth of death until finally, and fortunately, the little rodent found refuge down a hole in the floor where a pipe came into the classroom. After kicking violently at this pipe for several seconds, his face contorted with hatred, Ace realised that Twiggy had escaped, and he turned and vented his anger on one of the desks instead, lifting it and hurling it to the ground so that the legs broke. The noise was so great that the others, who had been happily wrecking the contents of the children's lockers, looked around in surprise.

'Let's trash this dump and get outta here!' Ace shouted.

A quarter of an hour or so later, the gang crept away, laughing and giggling, leaving an ominous light flickering on the walls and through the windows of Pokey Oaks Kindergarten.


	4. Part 4

Part 4

Ms. Sara Bellum had excelled herself. She was well known in Townsville as a superlative organiser, a woman whose calm composure and clear thinking had averted many a crisis, and it was common knowledge that the Mayor, whom many had begun to talk of as incipiently senile, would be incapable of holding his office without her constant assistance. To have called her an _éminence grise_ would be an understatement, for there was nothing _grise_ about it, she accompanied and overtly advised the Mayor on every official occasion. But this time she had outdone herself. With only a few days notice she had managed to put together a spectacle in Townsville Park such as that town had not seen in many a year. A travelling fair had been booked and had set up its rides and side-shows; a firework display had been laid on for the evening; and a great podium had been constructed for the presentation, with seats aplenty laid on for Townsville's great and good. Ice cream vans and hot dog stalls had a field day as, from mid-day onwards, the park filled up with the grateful residents of the city. Rainbow the clown, recently released from prison on parole, put on a funny show for the smaller children, and both kids and adults were amused by a variety of fire-eaters, jugglers, unicyclists and other entertainers who, at other times, would be regarded as at best eccentric, at worst deviant, by the rather staid population of Townsville. 

Professor Utonium was a bag of nerves all morning, pacing back and forth in his living room and making frequent trips to the lavatory. As the girls' 'father', it was incumbent upon him to make a formal speech thanking the Mayor and the City for the award, and that was precisely the sort of thing that he most hated, as it was precisely the sort of task that he felt most useless and incompetent at performing. Give him some differential equations to solve and he was a genius; ask him to string more than two words together into a coherent sentence in front of strangers and he was a bumbling simpleton. He had had a restless night, and had got up and dressed in his best suit far too soon, so that he now felt all the more uncomfortable, nervously fiddling with his shirt collar and trying to adjust his trousers, which had recently become, he noticed, just a little too tight. Of course, he was immensely proud that his girls, his creation, were to receive this great honour, but there was something that nagged away at him and spoiled his happiness somewhat, something other than his natural nervousness and the fit of his suit. The truth was, he was jealous. He tried to put this insidious, nasty little emotion to one side, but it wouldn't go away. The fact was that he was piqued that _he_ was not receiving an award too. He, after all, had created the girls, even if that creation had been largely accidental. He should have been happy for his girls, but instead this omission, this _snub_, merely resurrected old and painful memories. 

Professor Utonium had paid a high price for doing controversial work in a controversial field. At university, his experiments had caused more than a few raised eyebrows amongst his peers and colleagues, and had even been the subject of student protest. Pressure from the university authorities – mere unwarranted interference to the angry young post-doc – had caused him in the end to throw up his academic career altogether and strike out on his own. The death of both his parents within a few months of one another had provided him with sufficient money to pursue his researches alone, but the earnest and ardent Utonium soon discovered that Science was not the cool, objective subject he had imagined it to be from his early youth. Science, he had learned to his cost, was a social enterprise undertaken by human beings, and, as in any social context, those who refused to fit in and play the game were quickly ostracised and ridiculed. He began to find his papers rejected by learned journals on what he considered to be the flimsiest and most easily-refutable grounds; invitations to seminars and conferences dried up; and when he made the error of attempting to bypass the usual channels and appeal directly to the populist media, he found himself lambasted as a fool, a showman and a charlatan by a dozen respected academics. Naturally, there were any number of fringe groups who would listen to him and applaud his words, but no sooner had he talked to them than he found his statements taken out of context and used to justify crackpot theories and views, all of which had merely served to sully his reputation still further. It was a harsh, excoriating experience, and Utonium's reaction had been to run away, to leave it all behind. In the relatively isolated, insular community of Townsville he found that his reputation had not preceded him, and he was even able to get away with the small conceit of styling himself 'professor'. Determined that he would not put himself again through the pain of rejection and the even more unbearable slandering of his work, he had gradually begun to cut himself off, retreating more and more into his work, until weeks would go by without his speaking to another human being. He even went so far as to train a chimpanzee, Jojo, to act as his lab assistant, an assistant who could be guaranteed never to question his work.

The creation of the Powerpuff Girls had overturned Professor Utonium's life. During the first months of his new life in Townsville, he had slowly and imperceptibly begun to despise the people that he met in his everyday activities, visiting the shops, going to the theatre or cinema, even just walking in the street. They went about their lives ignorant of the world about them. They would rather watch tawdry soap operas than documentaries that would open their eyes to the wonders of the universe. They would rather save a few cents and stuff their already bulging bellies with hamburgers than invest in education and in projects that would improve the lives of everyone on the planet. To the few that had any interest in it at all, scientific research was just a trade secret to be hoarded for their own greed, a means for the rich to become richer. As he brooded in his laboratory, Utonium's bitterness and frustration with his own treatment had broadened and deepened into a hatred of the world in general, and his response was to shut himself off from it. He would have no further truck with the filth and ignorance of so-called civilisation. He had thrown his TV and radio into the trash, so disgusted had he become with the vile images of the society they projected, and instead turned for companionship and comfort to his books and his experiments. His house became permeated with an abiding silence. It might have gone on thus indefinitely: the days spent in the airless, windowless lab; the solitary, quiet evenings spent studying books and journals; the writing of countless reports and theses that no-one ever read; the fantasies of speeches and presentations that no-one ever heard. It might have gone on indefinitely, but for a second's carelessness from an improperly-trained lab assistant. An accidental spillage of chemicals; a violent explosion that threw Utonium across the room; and the self-styled professor's lonely world had crumbled to nothing. When the dust had settled and he had opened his eyes, they had been there: three little girls, Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup, hovering above the blackened workbench, highlighted in the fading glow of the chemical blast. He had looked at them for a second, and they had looked back, smiling, their enormous eyes not like his, dazed, shocked and frightened, but beaming with unconcealed devotion upon the man who had brought them into being. And, before he had even realised what was happening to him, the professor had found himself crying, great gulping sobs that left him short of breath, tears rolling unrestrained down his face and dampening his clothes.

Professor Utonium finished straightening his tie for the fourteenth time and smiled a wry, slightly self-conscious smile at himself in the mirror. How different he had been then, how gauche, how desperately unhappy. The girls had changed that forever. Back in those dark days, if you had told him that the world could, within the blink of an eye, appear physically brighter, the sky bluer, the rain warmer, the wind fresher, he would have scoffed and made a mental note that you were an ignorant simpleton unaware of the laws of physics. Yet that was what had happened. He had emerged from his laboratory into a world of sunshine, with a new understanding that the ignorance that he had seen all around him and had tried so desperately to escape had been within himself all along. Climbing the stairs to see if they were ready, Utonium felt the prickle of tears in his eyes again. Jealous of the girls? He owed them everything! If they had a thousand awards and he none, he would still be over-valued and they under-rewarded. The girls must have wondered at the strange catch in his voice as he told them, as sternly as he could muster, to hurry up and get in the car, they were late.

It was a beautiful day for a party, cold but bright, and when the Utonium family arrived at Townsville Park they found it thronged with what appeared to be the whole population of the city. They were directed to a special VIP parking area which was supposed to allow them to enter the park unnoticed, but of course the reporters had sussed this out with ease and they were subject to a barrage of questions and requests for photographs. It was a relief to reach the relative sanctuary of the podium, where the Mayor, the Chief of Police and Ms. Bellum, together with a number of other civic dignitaries, were waiting behind the scenes.

Just after two, the local high school band started up with an elaborate performance of music and marching more notable for its energy than its technical competence, and this was a signal for the girls and the others involved in the actual ceremony to take their seats on the platform, and for the audience to begin to assemble. The Mayor, who had discreetly been provided with a box to stand on so that he could see over the lectern that had been set up at the front of the stage, opened proceedings with a long, rambling and disjointed speech that quickly departed from Sara Bellum's carefully prepared text and wandered off into a never-never land that left his audience utterly baffled. This went on for some time, with the audience becoming increasingly restive and noisy, but, fortunately, before people started leaving it petered out into an embarrassing few moments of silence, as his speeches were wont to do, and the people of Townsville clapped and cheered more in relief than appreciation.

A few more boring speeches ensued, with various worthy residents extolling the virtues of the Girls, and then the presentation itself took place. A large, solid gold medal (a key had not been available in time) mounted on velvet in a beautiful presentation case was handed over by the Mayor to Bubbles, and the three little girls floated forward to the lectern for Blossom to make a short 'thank you' response. The Professor shifted nervously in his seat as his big moment approached. A hush came over the audience.

'You think you're something special, don't you?'

These words were said in a loud and clear voice, but they were not shouted, and only the people on stage and at the front of the audience could hear them.

'Do you think you're clever, putting innocent people in hospital?'

A murmuring came from the back of the audience, where people were beginning to think that Blossom had had an attack of nerves, whereas in fact Blossom and the other girls, and the Professor and the VIPs on the platform, were looking, startled, at the person who had interrupted the show. 

'You think you're so high and mighty, don't you? What gives you the right to go around busting up people's lives when you feel like it?'

The woman who was saying these things forced her way through the astonished people at the front of the crowd, not an easy process as she was pushing a buggy containing a small child, fast asleep.

'Er… Madam, I think there's been some mistake…' piped up the Mayor.

'You keep out of this, Shorty,' snapped the woman, 'There's no mistake. These brats put my husband in hospital, and you think it's something they should get a medal for. He's lost all his front teeth, his arm's broken in three places and they say he's lucky he's going to be able to walk. What is it with you kids,' she sneered, looking directly at the Powerpuff Girls, 'you like inflicting pain, do you? You get a thrill out of it?'

'No,' whispered a wobbly-voiced Bubbles.

'No, of course not. It's just playtime for you, isn't it? "What shall we do today? I know, let's go and _cripple a baby's father!_"'

'No it isn't!' said Blossom, her tone a mixture of astonishment and indignation, 'He was robbing the bank!'

'You think I don't know that?' replied the woman, her voice still loud but steady, 'You think I don't know what he was doing? You think I'm not ashamed? But you didn't ask why, did you? You didn't stop to ask what drives a decent man to do something like that. You just thought "beat him up, throw him in jail, kick him when he's down." Just like everybody else.'

'Look, we didn't have time for all that,' said Blossom, who did rather feel sorry for this woman, 'He was holding up the bank. He had a gun. There were a lot of frightened people. Someone could have been killed.'

'There's never any time, is there, for people like us?' said the woman, 'Not with people like you. We're just in the way. There wasn't any _time_ for my Terry down at the Mill, not when they found they could get a robot to do his job. There wasn't any _time_ when he went begging for a job - even the filthiest, crappiest ones, cos' they're the only ones he's _fit for_. There's never any time with you people because you're all to busy crapping on people like my husband on your way to the "top". What was your last slogan, Mayor?' she continued, turning to the Mayor, who smiled a vacuous smile in return, ' "The Best People come to Townsville." Well, what if you're _not_ the best? What's Townsville got to offer then? A kick in the teeth, that's what!'

'What the hell!' shouted Buttercup, who had had enough of this.

'Buttercup!' exclaimed a shocked Professor. 

'You creep!' cried Buttercup, still addressing the woman in the crowd, 'You think you can come here with your stupid sob stories and we'll forget he threatened to shoot people? There's plenty of other people in this town who're worse off than you are, but they don't go around robbing banks. I don't care if he _never_ walks again! "If you can't do the Time, don't do the Crime!"'

There was a murmur of approval from the people in the crowd.

'Get outta here!' said Buttercup, with a dismissive wave of her arm.

The Chief of Police nodded to two officers, who stepped forward to escort the woman away.

'The truth's too much for you, isn't it?' shouted the woman as the two policemen gently but firmly took her by the arms. 'You don't care about people like us,' she yelled, fighting off the officers to point with an outstretched arm at Blossom, 'You don't even care about the bank. That's right. You didn't care whether the bank was robbed or not. You didn't care about the people in there. What did you know about them? You didn't know or care any more about them than my Terry did. You went in there and put my husband in hospital for yourselves, for your own selfish reasons, so people'll clap you and give you medals. You think you're so much better than everybody else. Well you're not! You're scum! That's right, scum like me, scum like my Terry…'

'Get that woman out of here!' roared the Chief of Police. 

With considerably more force, the two policemen dragged the woman away, but in truth their effort was not needed, since she put up no resistance and merely continued to look at the little girls with a satisfied smile on her face until she was pulled around the side of the podium, out of sight.

'Are you all right, girls?' asked a shaky Professor, hugging his three precious creations to his breast.

'Yes,' replied an equally shaky Blossom.

'I want to go home,' said a miserable and tearful Bubbles.

'I think that would be a good idea, Professor.' It was the ever calm Sara Bellum who said these words. She put her hand on the Professor's shoulder. 'You take them home. There's no point in staying here now. I'll get the band to play again and you can slip away.'

The sudden wailing of the band distracted most of the crowd, and the Professor and the girls headed back to their car, but not before receiving many supportive comments from the people they passed.

'Well done, girls, keep up the good work!'

'They should lock people like that up!'

'Disgraceful, talking to children like that!'

Most of the journey home was conducted in a sombre silence, quite unlike the excited chatter that had filled their earlier trip to the park.

'Are you all right, Bubbles?' asked the Professor, as he pulled off the main highway and began navigating the myriad of small roads that led to their home.

'I'm all right, Professor,' replied Bubbles, who was sitting in the passenger seat by the Professor, 'I was just thinking. It is sad about that man in hospital. Maybe Blossom shouldn't have hit him so hard.'

'Now, it's not Blossom's fault,' said the Professor.

'No, I know,' said Bubbles, quickly, 'it's no-one's fault. It's just sad, with that little baby…'

'Oh, you didn't fall for that, did you?' exclaimed Buttercup, 'It's probably not her kid at all.'

'That's very cynical,' said the Professor.

'It's probably just a neighbour's kid that she's babysitting,' replied Buttercup, who did not know what 'cynical' meant but guessed that it implied that the Professor didn't believe her, 'It just adds to the effect, so we feel sorry for her.'

'Oh,' said Bubbles, who now knew what 'cynical' meant.

'Well, I don't feel sorry for her,' said Buttercup, pugnaciously. 'Well, all right, I do, sort of,' she added, less aggressively, after catching the Professor's eye in the rear-view mirror.

'She was very upset and she said some hurtful things,' said the Professor, 'People do say things they don't mean when they're angry.'

'She meant it,' muttered Buttercup, folding her arms.

'Maybe we should just be more careful in future,' piped up Bubbles again, 'If we just catch the criminals and don't beat them up…'

'Bubbles!' exclaimed Buttercup, 'What if he'd killed someone? How would you feel then? We can't go pussy-footing around because we might hurt some criminal. It's them hurting innocent people that's important, not us hurting them. We haven't got anything to be sorry about, we did the right thing. What do you say, Blossom?'

'Yes,' replied Blossom, quietly, looking out of the window, 'I think we did the right thing.'


	5. Part 5

Part 5

'Hurry up girls, you don't want to be late!'

Professor Utonium was in one of those 'Life is Perfect' moods that came upon him from time to time. The girls seemed to have recovered very well from the shock of the events on Saturday. On Sunday, yesterday, he had taken them on a trip into the countryside and they had taken a happy, playful walk through the woods – well, more of a _float_ through the woods, in their case – and they had listened and watched with a touching fascination as he had told them about the insects and plants and fungi they encountered. Only Blossom had seemed a little less than her usual lively self, and had wandered off on a couple of occasions, but then she was given to quiet moods when she seemed to need time to herself. The Professor smiled indulgently at the thought: Blossom was the one he could most easily relate to, she seemed so mature at times. She might not be quite as clever as Bubbles – the Professor had noticed this, too – but she was infinitely the more rational, the more focused and_ effective_ thinker. He knew that Bubbles and Buttercup would have forgotten the Saturday business easily, Buttercup because she would be angry and would have pushed the incident aside in her mind, Bubbles because she found it difficult to think about the same thing for more than a few minutes together; but Blossom would have wanted some time to think it through.

The Professor rarely ate breakfast, and he had grown used to being able to leave the girls to look after themselves – something no other responsible parent of kindergarten-age children could afford to do. After waiting to ensure that they were ready for school, he returned to his lab, and the girls began making themselves some hot porridge, for it was a cold morning.

The Professor had been incorrect in thinking that the girls had forgotten the incident on Saturday. In many ways, he underestimated them. He believed - or maybe wanted to believe - that the girls would always confide in him and would always come to him for help and guidance. He overlooked the fact that they were used to dealing with problems as a team, that they looked first to each other for support. In moments of trouble, they closed ranks, and this behavioural aspect of their super powers was something that had escaped the Professor's attention in the battery of tests to which he had subjected the girls over the years. They were far more independent than he gave them credit for, far more than their classmates at Pokey Oaks Kindergarten. Nothing quite like what had happened on Saturday had happened to the girls before, and far from forgetting it, they had discussed it amongst themselves as they lay in bed the previous night, and their conversation now soon turned from idle chatter to that very subject. 

'I wish we'd never gone,' said Bubbles, stirring the saucepan of porridge on the stove, 'Stupid medal! It spoilt the whole weekend.' 

'It wouldn't be any different if we hadn't,' replied Blossom, thoughtfully, 'we just wouldn't know how that lady felt.' 

'We'd know how _we_ felt,' observed Buttercup. 

'I know what Blossom means, though,' said Bubbles, 'She'd still be unhappy because of what we did.' 

'She'd be unhappy because of what her _husband_ did,' replied Buttercup. 

'Perhaps we should do something for her,' suggested Bubbles. 

'That's a good idea,' said Blossom. 

'Why should we?' snapped Buttercup. 

'Well, it's not _her_ fault her husband's in prison.' 

'It's not ours, either,' retorted Buttercup. 

'Yes, but we did put him there and I expect she's finding it difficult to cope on her own. I wonder if she has any money? At least if we did something it would show we don't have anything against _her_.' 

'What can we do?' asked Bubbles. 

'Maybe we could babysit for her,' suggested Blossom. 

'I know!' exclaimed Bubbles, 'Why don't we go to the supermarket and get some things for her? We could get some shopping and maybe some toys for the baby.' 

'That's a nice thought, Bubbles,' said Blossom, 'We'll do that, after school.' 

After they had finished their breakfast, washed up the dishes, and called goodbye to the Professor, the girls set off for Pokey Oaks. The kindergarten was a mile or so from their home, but the girls could cross this distance in an instant, and they usually played a little game with Ms. Keane by contriving to reach their desks at the very moment that she was about mark them as late. It was thus quite normal for them to be the very last children to arrive. However, as they approached Pokey Oaks today, the girls noticed that there was something odd going on. The playground was filled with children and adults, and the queue of people-carriers and off-roaders that would normally be clear by now was still clogging the road. 

The girls landed in the midst of great deal of noise and excitement. All around the playground, groups of parents were engaged in animated conversation, whilst the children, the girls' classmates, were darting between these groups laughing and playing quite happily. Ms. Keane spotted the girls' arrival and, hastily apologising to the parents that she had been talking to, ran over to speak to them.

'Oh girls,' she cried, in a very thick voice, 'something terrible has happened!' 

'What?' chorused the girls, delighted. 

'I think you'd better take a look for yourselves.' 

Ms. Keane led the three of them into the building and through to the main classroom. When she opened the door, the scene that greeted them was one of complete devastation. Someone had clearly attempted to burn the school down. In the centre of the room, there was a huge pile of debris made up of half-burnt desks, the rusty metal skeletons of several chairs and an enormous quantity of ash, and the walls and ceiling were covered in a thick, brown tarry-looking substance. The door to Ms Keane's own little office was hanging from one hinge, its window broken, and the office itself had been ransacked, the filing cabinet broken into and its contents strewn around the floor. 

'I just don't know what say girls,' said Ms Keane, who was close to tears, 'I just can't understand who would want to do this. The computers are all smashed. The class project work has gone. Oh!' She put her hand to her mouth in a gesture of shock as she suddenly remembered something. 'Those things that Townsville Museum lent us! How on earth am I going to tell them? Oh, I'd just like to get my hands on the people who did this.' 

She turned away for a moment and blew her nose. 

'They've gone through all the lockers,' continued Miss Keane after a few seconds, dabbing at her eyes with her handkerchief, 'but I'm afraid they've _really_ picked on yours.' 

'Never mind, Ms. Keane,' said Bubbles, unexpectedly. She reached out and touched her teacher's hand. 'It's not your fault. They just wanted to get _us_.' 

'Yeah, there are some spiteful, cowardly people in Townsville,' said Buttercup, 'Don't worry, we'll find out who they are and teach 'em a lesson!' 

'I forgot,' said Miss Keane, with a wan smile, 'you girls are used to this sort of thing. Do you really think you can find out who did it?' 

'We can try,' said Blossom, 'Girls, search for clues!' 

The three little girls began to sift through the remains of the classroom looking for evidence that might identify the perpetrators. In this forensic work they were greatly assisted by their ability to fly, which enabled them to search with the minimum of disturbance to the evidence.

Suddenly, Blossom let out a little gasp.

'My book!' she cried. She picked up a charred piece of cardboard, all that remained of her book on conversational Chinese.

'You can get another book, Blossom,' said Buttercup, who had turned around to look and was rather irritated that her search had been interrupted by such an irrelevance.

Blossom threw her sister an angry glance. She held onto the piece of book cover for a few more seconds, then threw it back into the pile of ashes.

'Yes,' she said, quietly. 

Blossom returned to the search, but try as she might, she found that she was unable to concentrate on the task in hand. She tried to examine the lockers for fingerprints with her microscopic vision, but no matter how many times she shook her head to try to get her focus back on what she was doing, it was impossible to stop her thoughts straying back to the terrible shock she had experienced on seeing that little bit of burnt card. The book had been a Christmas present from the Professor, and it represented something far more than mere paper and print, far more than any other present. How to put it in words? It was an adult present in the midst of a flurry of stuffed animals and toys. When she had torn off the wrapping paper and read the title on the spine, and had looked up in delight to thank the Professor, something special, a small, intimate moment of understanding, had passed between her and her creator. Their eyes had met and for a moment two similar souls had made contact. It made her feel special, _chosen_, uniquely close to the man who had brought her into the world. Now all that remained of that moment was this black, mutilated piece of garbage. It was an affront, it was an obscenity, and she had to fight hard to hold back the tears.

'Oh!' Bubbles let out a little squeak and held up her arms to her mouth in a gesture of horror.

'What is it?' asked Blossom, trying to shake off her feelings.

'Look!'

Bubbles pointed to another dark shape on the floor. Although most of it had been melted down to a blackened, formless mass, enough of Twiggy's plastic hamster cage remained to make it recognisable.

'I'll kill whoever did this!' shouted Buttercup.

The three girls looked at one another.

'Keep looking,' said Blossom, grimly.

It was Buttercup who spotted the crucial clue.

'Look at this,' she said, pointing to the wall.

There, just visible beneath the black stains of the fire, were the words "Miss Keane stinks signed Bubbles".

'I didn't write that!' exclaimed Bubbles, horrified.

'Of course you didn't,' said Buttercup, 'Look at the handwriting. Who do we know with handwriting like that?'

'Big Billy,' said Blossom, 'Let's go!'

For once, the girls left the classroom through the door. They did not want to get dirty breaking through the sooty ceiling. Each of them had mixed emotions as they streaked across the city towards the Dump. Oddly, Buttercup had initially taken the destruction of Pokey Oaks with equanimity. It struck her at first as being quite fun that the two sides of her life – her role as a super-heroine and her life as an ordinary kid at the school – had come together. Only when she had seen the destruction wrought upon the little hamster did her anger explode at the thought of the miserable, cowardly individuals who could have done such a thing. Bubbles, whom Ms. Keane had imagined might have gone into hysterics at the sight of the destroyed classroom, had been completely unmoved by the physical damage. She had been shocked at the death of Twiggy, of course, but it was actually Ms. Keane's unhappiness, that little snuffle when she had tried to hide the fact that she was crying, that had caused her the most pain. It had also not escaped hypersensitive Bubbles' attention that Blossom was very upset, but since Blossom had said nothing she was reluctant to question her. Blossom herself was angry. She could feel the anger seething inside her. When she thought of Ace and the other all-too-familiar members of the Gangreen Gang something like a shock of electricity seemed to sear through her brain, fracturing her thoughts with the desire to pound them, to smash them, to beat them to a pulp. As a rule, she was the one who could be relied upon to keep her composure in a crisis, but there was something too _personal_ in this attack, something that seemed to hit, in some way, all of the people she loved. If the Gangreens wanted to attack her physically, then fine, she could take that. She could take a beating, and give one too, but there were some things they had no _business_ touching, some things that were no concern of theirs. When the three girls reached the Dump, Blossom smashed her way, with a single blow, through the door of the Gang's hut without pausing for thought. It was an impetuous move reminiscent of some of Buttercup's adventures, and great splinters of wood were sent flying through the interior, but it was a wasted effort, for the hut was empty.

In frustration, Blossom picked up the deal table and hurled it against the wall, where it shattered into its component parts.

'What're you doing?' asked Buttercup in surprise.

'Let's smash this place up,' replied Blossom, 'Give them a taste of their own medicine!'

'What's the point?' said Buttercup, 'Look at it.'

There was indeed nothing to smash. The hut was utterly impersonal.

'I just wish there was something here that was important to _them_!' exclaimed Blossom, recognising the truth in Buttercup's words.

'This is all they have,' said Bubbles, quietly, looking around the bare room, 'They haven't _got_ anything that's important to them.'

'Who cares about _things_?' said Buttercup, 'It's _them_ we want!'

'Well?' said Blossom, who was beginning to feel uneasy that it was Buttercup who was acting as the Voice of Reason.

'Well, let's go and look for them. They're probably down at the Arcade. That's where they spend most of their time when they're not causing trouble!'

'Let's wait for them here,' replied Blossom, determined to be more grown up about this, 'That'd be better than going in and breaking up the Arcade. Some innocent person might get hurt.'

The girls had only a short wait. As Buttercup had predicted, the Gangreen Gang had spent most of the morning throwing away their ill-gotten money down at the amusement arcade. When their funds ran low, they spent what remained on some cheap beer and returned to their hideout with the intention of wasting the afternoon getting drunk and scheming how to get some more money to repeat the whole process again on the morrow. They had already consumed some of the beer on the journey and were loud and merry as they approached the hut, and were not at all prepared for a reception committee.

'Here they come,' whispered Buttercup.

Through the window of the hut, Blossom saw the half-witted Big Billy approaching with an asinine smile on his face, and the sight sent such a dizzying wave of anger through her head that it felt as though she had been physically struck. The hut door opened.

'So, you like picking on little kids, do you?' shouted Blossom, leaping forward to confront a stunned Gang, 'Let's see you pick on us!'

With that, she dealt Big Billy a blow in the stomach that sent him reeling across the hut and through the flimsy wall. He landed on his back in a filthy, icy puddle.

'Hey, what's all this?' whined Ace, his arms outstretched in a gesture of innocence, 'We ain't done nothin'.'

Blossom grabbed him by the collar and lifted him off his feet.

'Oh no?' she yelled, 'Killing a defenceless little hamster is nothing is it? Well I think it _is_ something.'

She punched Ace in the face four times before throwing him through the door to land face down next to Billy. At this point the remaining, conscious, members of the Gang made a run for it. Grubber, who suffered from a deformity of the spine, had no chance to escape and was caught by a flying kick on the backside from Buttercup, propelling him head over heels across the trash and mud until he landed in a heap of slimy plastic rubbish sacks that split and spewed their entrails of half-eaten take-aways all over him. Snake had taken to his heels as soon as he had spotted the girls, his legs skittering and sliding under him on the frozen ground, and managed to hide and escape punishment. Little Arturo was simply picked up bodily by Blossom and flung headlong into the same pile of rancid filth as Grubber.

With a moan, Big Billy tottered to his feet, holding his stomach. In an instant, Blossom swooped down upon him, kicking him in the teeth so that a great gout of blood spurted from his lips. He staggered back and was again caught in the stomach by another kick from Blossom. He collapsed to the ground, vomiting.

'Blossom!' shouted an astonished Buttercup, 'Leave it! He's finished.'

Breathing heavily, Blossom paused. Buttercup was right. Billy was out of it. They all were.

'We haven't finished with you guys yet!' yelled Buttercup, 'You'll do time for this!'

She looked around. 'Oh yeah,' she said, 'Thanks for all your help, _Bubbles_!'

Bubbles was standing in the doorway of the hut, staring at the inanimate bodies of the four gang members. She seemed not to have heard Buttercup's words.

'What?' she said, in a rather dazed and automatic way.

'What the hell were you doing?' asked Buttercup, indignantly.

'Yeah,' added Blossom, frowning, 'Why didn't you help?'

'I don't know,' said Bubbles, looking at the floor, 'It's just…' She looked up at Blossom. 'It's just what you were saying about things that were important to them. Look.'

Bubbles gestured at the inside of the hut, which was quite visible to the other girls thanks to the huge hole made by Billy during his unscheduled exit.

'There's nothing. Nothing important to them at all.'

'So?' said Buttercup, shaking her head.

'Well, they probably think it makes them strong. No one can hurt them. They've got nothing to lose. They don't have a hamster that they love that someone can kill, or things that they've made that mean something to them, or presents that people have given them that they treasure. They think it makes them tough, having nothing to lose. But it doesn't. It just means they've got nothing to live for.'

Blossom and Buttercup looked at one another, and Bubbles began to feel self-conscious.

'I just thought,' she continued, looking at the floor again, 'What if you'd killed them? What if they were all dead? Who'd come here and be sad for them? No-one. What could people say about the Gangreen Gang if they came here and saw this place? That they had a hut with a table and some chairs, and one of them was called Billy.' She pointed with her arm to the name, carved roughly into the wall with a penknife. 'That's all you can say about five people: they had a few bits of furniture and one of them was called Billy. That's so sad, it seemed like punishment enough.' She looked up again. 'I'm sorry.'

'Yeah, well,' said Buttercup, uncomfortably, 'Only you could feel sorry for the Gangreen Gang, Bubbles. They don't care about things like that.'

'Don't they?' replied Bubbles, almost to herself, 'Perhaps they don't think about it.'

Frowning, Blossom flew over to stand in front of Bubbles.

'Look,' she said, 'It's nice to be concerned about people, but we're supposed to be a team. We work together. You've got to keep your mind on the job. We took them by surprise this time, but it could've been different, and we'd need your help.'

'Sorry,' said Bubbles, again looking at the floor.

'The important thing was to stop the Gang doing what they did to the school again. That's why we came here. If you start getting sentimental about criminals, it could put Buttercup and me in danger. We're relying on you. Can you see that?'

'Yes,' replied Bubbles in a very tiny voice.

'Just think about all the damage they did at school. You wouldn't want to see that happen again, would you? That's the only thing to concentrate on – protecting Townsville and the people we love. Your personal feelings don't come into it.'

'Oh?' snapped Bubbles, looking fiercely at her sister, 'That's what you were doing was it? Putting personal feelings aside?'

'What do you mean?' asked Blossom, shakily, aghast at this sudden flaring-up.

'You weren't beating up Big Billy for Townsville, or our loved ones,' said Bubbles, 'You were doing it for yourself!'

'That's not true!' cried Blossom.

'Isn't it?' replied Bubbles, with tears in her eyes. In a blinding blue flash, she vanished, soaring into the sky.

'Bubbles!' called Blossom.

'Let's go!' said Buttercup, who had grown bored with the whole scene.


	6. Part 6

Part 6

Blossom and Buttercup returned home to a very quiet house indeed. The Professor was in his lab with the door firmly shut, usually taken as a sign that he did not want to be disturbed. Bubbles was nowhere to be found. Rush hour was over, and the morning hush had descended upon suburban Townsville. The almost eerie quiet, coupled with the feeling of anti-climax that inevitably followed the earlier excitement, left both girls with a reluctance to break the silence.

Buttercup was disturbed by this atmosphere. Her sisters' behaviour had unsettled her. She normally took great delight in teasing Bubbles, because she was such an easy target and so very accommodating, quick to upset and quick to forgive. It was most unlike her to go off like this, and Buttercup actually found herself feeling very protective towards her sensitive sister and very annoyed at Blossom, whom she blamed for Bubbles' upset. It seemed to her that Blossom had hit on Bubbles just a little too hard. So she'd gone into one of her silly daydreams at a bad moment: so what? It wasn't the first time, it wouldn't be the last time, and it just didn't matter. She really couldn't understand why Blossom had found it necessary to harp on as she had. Then again, Blossom's behaviour in general struck Buttercup as rather perplexing. Buttercup had always harboured a desire to be the leader of the trio, and rather fancied that she could do a better job of it than Blossom, but in truth she was a lot more dependent upon Blossom's good judgement than she cared to admit. There was something about Blossom's attitude today that made her distinctly uneasy, a side of Blossom that she had not seen before and which made her really concerned, for the first time, about whether Blossom was losing her grip as leader. The fact that this worried her, that there was a part of her that was afraid that this might mean that she would have to take on the responsibility of that role, and which doubted her ability to fulfil it, just made Buttercup all the more irritated at her sister. After standing in the silence of the kitchen for a few minutes, watching Blossom make a cup of coffee without saying a word, Buttercup floated outside, also without saying a word, and began kicking a ball about the yard in a desultory way. There was definitely something wrong, and she was pretty convinced it wasn't her fault, but something made her reluctant to say anything about it. It was all very depressing.

Blossom was not consciously ignoring her sister as she pottered about the kitchen making coffee; she had just forgotten about her. The admission of truth is not always a cathartic experience. Sometimes it means only that still more, less palatable truths must be faced. This realisation was beginning to dawn upon Blossom, and it made her very unhappy. She was unhappy about what had happened at Pokey Oaks. She was unhappy at her reaction to what had happened. She was unhappy about her behaviour towards the Gangreen Gang, and Big Billy in particular. She was unhappy at upsetting Bubbles. And, most of all, she was unhappy with what Bubbles had said: because it contained an essential and inescapable truth. She sat at the kitchen table with the cup of coffee, untouched, before her, the only sound the gentle whirr of the refrigerator. The silence suited her mood exactly. Everything had gone wrong today. She was supposed to be the thinker, the clever one who could take a calm and rational view regardless of the circumstances. She modelled herself, in part, on what she believed the Professor was like, detached, sceptical and objective, able to take an analytical view of her own feelings as well as the feelings and motivations of others, but all that now seemed nothing more than a game, a bit of play-acting that helped her feel cleverer and better than everyone else. 

Blossom suddenly felt very alone. She needed someone to talk to, to reassure her, but her feelings were so very personal that she wasn't sure she could discuss them. Nor was there anyone to turn to. She felt estranged from her sisters, which was in itself an unfamiliar and disturbing phenomenon. The responsibilities of leadership had always weighed heavily on Blossom's shoulders, and the authority that leadership brought had always seemed little compensation for the constant, nagging feeling that she must always be setting an example, must always not only be seen to be doing the right thing but to actually do it. This morning, she had let her sisters down, she had let _herself_ down. Making mistakes was one thing, that was something she had never had any trouble admitting (but was that just part of the game?), but this was more than a mere mistake, this felt like she had undermined the whole team. They relied on her, she was the linchpin, and she had to set a standard. As for the Professor, what would he say? That was an even worse thought. He expected a great deal from her and she had failed him. Blossom leant forward on the table and stared into her coffee, her head in her arms.

Blossom was still in something of a self-pitying reverie when there was a tiny click and the kitchen door opened. It was Bubbles. When she saw Blossom she hesitated in the doorway. 

'Hello,' said Blossom, awkwardly, 'where have you been?' 

'I went back to school,' replied Bubbles, 'I helped to clear up.' 

'That was a nice thought,' said Blossom, who felt she should have thought of it herself, instead of wallowing here on her own, a thought which did nothing to improve her spirits. 

'Twiggy is all right,' said Bubbles, coming rather tentatively into the kitchen, 'she was under the floor. I heard her.' 

'Oh, that's good,' replied Blossom, with a rather embarrassed smile. 

Bubbles floated over to get some juice from the fridge, but as she passed her sister she stopped momentarily and reached out and touched Blossom's arm. Blossom looked up, a little surprised, into Bubbles' smiling face. Moments later, the two sisters were hugging each other tightly. 

'I'm sorry,' said Blossom, wiping away a tear. 

Bubbles squeezed her sister a little tighter. 

'I love you,' she said. 

'I love you too, Bubbles,' whispered Blossom. 

As the sisters separated and Bubbles began to search in the fridge, there was the sound of a door opening and closing. The Professor had come out of his laboratory. He wandered off into the living room and returned a few moments later with a book. He was about to return to the lab when he caught sight of the girls through the open kitchen doorway. 

'Oh, girls, yes,' he said, his mind clearly on something else, 'Ms. Keane phoned and told me about what happened at the school. She says you are going to be at home for a few days until they get a temporary classroom installed. Did you manage to find any clues to who did it?' 

'It was the Gangreen Gang!' said Bubbles. 

'They really smashed the place up, Professor,' added Blossom, gravely, 'They destroyed everybody's things, even Ms. Keane's. They smashed up the computers, and they tried to burn the school down. _And_ they tried to kill Twiggy.' 

'Who on earth is Twiggy?' asked the Professor. 

'Our hamster,' said Bubbles. 

'Oh, I see. But nobody was hurt, that's the main thing.'

'Yes, but education is the most important activity in the world – that's what you've always told us, Professor,' said Blossom, 'The Gangreen Gang tried to stop that activity, not just for us but for all the children of Townsville. If education is the most important activity, that must be one of the worst crimes possible!'

'Yes, well, you might be overstating the case a bit, Blossom,' replied the Professor, 'Now look, can you girls entertain yourselves for the rest of the day? I've got a lot of work to do.' 

'Yes, we're going out later,' said Bubbles. 

'Good. Have a nice time. Look after yourselves,' replied Professor Utonium, already walking towards the door to his laboratory. 

Blossom followed the Professor out of the kitchen. 

'Professor,' she said, very quietly, just as he was about to enter his laboratory, 'the Gangreen Gang destroyed my Christmas present.' 

'What present was that, Blossom?' asked the Professor. 

'My Chinese primer.' 

'Was that a Christmas present?' 

'Yes, don't you remember?' 

'Oh, never mind, I'll buy you a proper present at the weekend. Anything you want. How does that sound? Now, Blossom, I really must get on. You will be all right this afternoon won't you?' 

'Yes, Professor,' replied Blossom, meekly. 

Professor Utonium entered the lab and closed the door. Blossom turned slowly and drifted back into the kitchen. What did he mean by a 'proper present'? 

'What's up?' asked Bubbles. 

'Nothing.' 

'Is the Professor all right?' 

'Yes, he's fine. Where's Buttercup?' 

'She's outside.'

Blossom made a conscious effort to pull herself together. There were things to do, and she had to organise them. 

'We need to get some money if we're going out shopping,' she said, briskly, 'How much have you got?' 

'I don't know - I'll go and see.' 

Bubbles disappeared up the stairs in a flash to fetch her pocket money. Blossom, meanwhile, had a battle on her hands to get Buttercup to contribute her savings to the proposed project. Buttercup was adamant that she did not owe anybody anything. 

'It's not a question of owing,' said Blossom, 'it's about goodwill. Although it's our duty to keep Townsville free of crime, we have to recognise that sometimes innocent people can be hurt. All we're doing is showing that we care about that. And after all, helping people is part of our job too. Why shouldn't we help people who are relatives of criminals, if they're not criminals themselves?'

'Because it looks like we're admitting we did something wrong in locking that bank robber up.'

'No, we're not. We're just showing that we take our responsibilities seriously.' 

Buttercup was eventually browbeaten into parting with her pocket money. Blossom telephoned the police department to get the address of the man they had arrested for the bank robbery, and the three little girls then spent an enjoyable afternoon at the shopping mall, collecting together a range of items that they thought would be suitable for the bank robber's family. 

Blossom had to consult a map to locate the robber's house, as it was in a part of town they had never visited. Carrying bags full of their purchases, the girls set out across Townsville, flying above the streets with Blossom navigating. To the north of the city, they entered an area where the streets were closed in with tall, old tenement buildings. Some heavy cloud had set in, so the girls were forced to fly low, twisting and turning with the streets, with Blossom calling out directions from time to time: 'We need to turn right here' 'Straight on – no, wait, left!'. There were lots of people in the streets they passed over, just as there had been in the centre of town, but whereas the people in town had been going places and there had been a general air of hustle and bustle, here a lot of people were just standing in doorways or sitting on steps or wandering along rather aimlessly. There seemed to be a lot of litter on the roads, and today must have been the day for the garbage collection, because there were piles of sagging plastic rubbish sacks everywhere, piled up against lamp posts and in doorways. Unfamiliar sights and sounds and smells assailed the girls from all sides. They passed a woman dressed in shabby clothes who was talking loudly to herself and gesticulating angrily at passers-by, all of whom ignored her. They saw people wearing exotic-looking clothes not for fashion but as their everyday working garments, shops with names written in strange lettering and filled with odd-looking foods and goods, dark and unpleasant-looking doorways that claimed to lead to 'erotic theatres' and 'adult shows', whatever they were. It made the girls feel very uncomfortable and homesick, even though they were only a few miles from their own front door.

Blossom had difficulty reading the map and flying and holding on to two bags of shopping simultaneously, and several times the girls had to turn back and follow a modified route, all of which naturally delighted Buttercup, who was able to mutter 'I told you so' on several occasions. Eventually, though, Blossom led them around a corner and with a gasp of surprise they entered a different and seemingly familiar world. The tenements were gone and streets of houses, with trees and gardens, stretched before them.

'It should be just down here,' said Blossom, pointing.

Number 1324 Pleasant Valley Drive was a bungalow with a wide porch at the front. It had a front garden, which had evidently not been tended for some time, and a driveway which consisted of nothing more than two strips of bare earth where a car had been driven repeatedly over part of the lawn. The clapboards of the bungalow had obviously once been painted white, a very long time ago, but they were now peeling and grey, and by the side of the house there was a big old car, propped up on bricks, that had begun to collect moss on its roof. Around the back there was a sordid-looking old caravan that had turned a pale, streaky shade of green with a similar coating of moss or lichen.

The girls came down to land at the front of the house, and stepped up to the porch. Faced with the front door, Blossom became acutely aware of the awkwardness of their situation. Here they were, unannounced, at the home of someone who had professed to detest them, trying, in a way, to buy off that person's enmity. A feeling of unease crept over her as she opened the screen door, and her first taps on the front door were just a little too faint. How convenient if no-one answered! She looked around at Bubbles and Buttercup: there they were, as usual, looking to her to do the right thing. She took a deep breath and thumped the door again, much louder this time. There was no answer.

'It looks empty,' said Bubbles, who was peering in at one of the windows. 'Ew!', she squeaked, looking at her arms where they had been pressed against the glass, 'The windows are all dirty!'

'Let's look round the back,' said Blossom, who tempered her relief that there seemed to be no-one in with an almost masochistic desire to see this thing through.

A smell of damp and decay greeted the girls as they floated around the side of the house. A large dog in next door's yard barked at them ferociously and strained at the heavy chain that secured it to a post there. The back yard, filled mainly with the slimy old caravan, contained a number of other interesting items including a rusty bucket, an old saucepan, several piles of rotting timber and a number of plastic shopping bags containing something that gave off an unpleasant smell. 

It began to rain.

'Let's go,' said Buttercup, with a shiver, 'There's no-one in.'

'We'll only have to come back again tomorrow,' replied Blossom, firmly. 'Still,' she continued, trying to see into the dark interior of the house, 'we can't just leave the things here. Maybe we _will_ have to come back…'

Blossom cut short her reply. She had noticed that one of the windows was open.

'Look,' she exclaimed, 'we could go in through there. We could leave the things, with a note.'

Buttercup and Bubbles looked at one another.

'Are you sure that's a good idea?' asked Bubbles.

'Why not? We're not going to take anything, or break anything, are we?' said Blossom, 'We'll just leave the things, and a note explaining where they've come from, and go.'

Rather reluctantly, Bubbles and Buttercup followed their sister through the window. They found themselves in the kitchen, which was as dark and damp and cold and horrible as outside. The floor was covered in some sort of plastic material that was curling up at the edges. The sink was filled with clothes that had presumably been left to soak, and the draining-board was piled with dirty crockery. More unwashed crockery and cutlery stood on the pine table that was positioned in the centre of the room. 

'What's that?' asked Bubbles, frowning.

The girls listened. From beneath the filthy floor covering and within the cupboards, their ultrasensitive hearing detected the scratchy, itchy sound of cockroaches.

'This is gross!' said Bubbles.

'I don't think we should be here,' said Buttercup, 'Why don't we just go. This was all a big mistake.'

'No,' said Blossom, 'Just because these people are poor and Bubbles doesn't like getting dirty doesn't mean we should turn our backs on them. Quite the opposite: it's all the more reason for us to help. If the place is dirty, we'll clean it up. It won't take long if we use our super powers.'

Bubbles and Buttercup looked around at the sticky floor, the mess in the sink, the stained walls and the grease-covered ceiling, then looked at each other, unhappily. Buttercup shrugged. 

'OK,' she said, less than enthusiastically.

Even for super heroes with super powers, cleaning the bungalow presented a challenge. Just clearing out the garbage, including what appeared to be several months' worth of accumulated newspapers that were lying around in several rooms, was a major task. Then there were dishes to wash, clothes to clean and iron, walls and work surfaces to scrub, beds to make, carpets to shake out and beat, the list was endless and the girls realised that they would not be able to do it all. Nevertheless, when they had finished the place was transformed. It might not be perfect, but at least it was habitable.

'We'll just leave a note and then we can go,' said Blossom.

'Good,' replied Bubbles, 'I'm pooped!'

Just at that moment, there was a sort of bump and the sound of an engine vibrated through the house. After a second or two it stopped and a car door slammed. Moments later there was a rattle at the front door as a key was inserted into the lock, and the door opened. It was the woman who had shouted at the girls at the presentation. She held the child that the girls had seen on that occasion in one arm, and for a few moments she struggled in the doorway bringing in some bags of shopping. Once the bags were inside, she closed the door and turned to go into the kitchen, and the expression on her face changed. She looked around in astonishment.

'Come on,' whispered Blossom, and led Bubbles and Buttercup into the hallway. The woman looked at them, but scarcely seemed to register their presence, such was the dazed expression on her face.

'Hi,' said Blossom, nervously, 'I expect you're wondering what's going on. Well, we thought about what you said to us the other day, and we decided we'd like to help you. Being Powerpuff Girls isn't just about catching criminals, you know, it's about using our special powers to help people. Your husband did a bad thing, and we had to do what we did, but that doesn't mean we can't help you.'

'We got some presents for the baby,' said Bubbles, with a smile, 'They're in the kitchen.'

'Yeah, and we've tidied up a bit and got the place nice and warm,' said Buttercup.

'You thought you'd come and help me, did you? _You_ thought,' said the woman, slowly. She put the child down on the floor. 'Oh, thank you, Powerpuff Girls,' she continued, 'Things were so hard for me here with my husband in prison, I thought I could never cope. I was really upset with what you did, but now I can see that you're really good little girls and I'm so very, very sorry with what I said about you.'

Blossom looked at the other girls and smiled. She turned back to the woman and opened her mouth to say something, but was cut short by the woman herself.

'That's what you want to hear, isn't it?' said the woman, staring directly into Blossom's face, ' "Oh, Powerpuff Girls, how can I cope without you." "Oh, aren't these presents _wonderful_." Yeah, just come in and interfere with my life some more, why not? Turn on all the radiators, who cares about the bill? Buy some presents, why dontcha', then when the kid's eyes light up because he's got some new toys you can get all weepy and sentimental and have a little cry and think what wonderful people you are. Oh, it's just lovely, isn't it, _helping_ people, poking your noses into people's lives – but for the best possible motives, of course,' she sneered, 'All the pleasure is in the Giving, isn't it? Why don't you just rub it in how much you've got? Why don't _you_ just decide what I need and what's good for me?'

'Yes, but…' stammered Blossom, 'You said it was difficult for you. We just wanted to help. It was a bit dirty in here, and we've got super powers, so why shouldn't we…'

'What the _hell_ has it got to do with you?' screamed the woman, her fists clenched and her face screwed up for a brief moment into a picture of frenzied hatred, 'What the hell has it got to do with you how I live? If I've got any problems I'll sort them out for myself! I don't need _anything_ from you, I don't _want_ anything from you. How _dare_ you break in here?'

She raised her fists in an agony of frustration and brought them down as if she were striking a table that stood invisible in front of her.

'Get Out!' she yelled, 'Get out and take your filthy presents with you!'

Blossom looked at her sisters. Tears were running down Bubbles' face and Buttercup was clearly fuming.

'All right, we'll go,' she said.

'Think yourselves lucky I haven't called the police,' called the woman, triumphantly, as the three crestfallen little girls exited the bungalow by the way they had come in – through the kitchen window – taking the bags of presents with them.

Outside, Buttercup hurled away the presents she was carrying, and they fell with great force into the yard next door, causing the surprised dog to cease its barking and slink out of sight behind a dustbin.

'This stinks!' she shouted, vehemently, and shot into the air, disappearing in a green flash above the grey, scudding clouds.

Blossom and Bubbles looked at the bags they were carrying.

'Perhaps we can get our money back,' said Blossom.

'We could give them to charity,' said Bubbles.

'Maybe,' replied Blossom.


	7. Part 7

Part 7

A mobile, temporary classroom was delivered to Pokey Oaks Kindergarten on Tuesday. It arrived in two halves on the back of two large trucks and had to be bolted together by a trio of workmen who spent a good part of their time making drinks and talking to, chatting-up and talking about Ms. Keane, much to that lady's annoyance. It was ready for use on Wednesday, and the new surroundings caused the children a great deal of excitement. Ms. Keane added to the entertainment by declaring the classroom to be inadequately heated, telling the kids that they could wear their outdoor clothes during lessons, and, for a while, until heat stroke got the better of them, she found herself teaching a class of what appeared to be refugees from Captain Scott's last trip to the Antarctic.

All three Powerpuff Girls were glad to get back to school. They had spent a thoroughly miserable Tuesday indoors, trapped by driving rain. Not that Blossom or Bubbles had particularly felt like doing anything. They both had hardly spoken a word all day. Only Buttercup had wandered back and forth from room to room like a caged animal. She had found it particularly hard to deal with as both her sisters seemed to be able to entertain themselves, whilst she was totally bored – which, of course, just made her unreasonably annoyed with _them_. She had done little things to upset them, like throwing toys at them, until they shouted at her, at which point she had gone off in a sulk to vegetate in front of the TV, where she had been joined later in the day by a still quiet Bubbles. Blossom had spent much of the day reading her encyclopaedias and staring through the window at the grey scene outside. The Blossom "I'm So Smart" Encyclopaedia Set had been one of a range of products produced in Townsville to capitalise on the Powerpuff Girls' fame, and Blossom had been presented with a set by the manufacturers. This gloomy Tuesday, though, she hadn't felt very smart. Leafing through the pages without really reading them, she had a horrible, sick feeling in her stomach and a shaky, almost feverish sensation in her limbs. It hadn't been an illness that had brought on these symptoms, it had been a terrible feeling that things she believed in and had based her life around were all false, most particularly the belief that she knew what she was doing, that she had some sort of understanding of the role she and her sisters had in life. She was beginning to think that, far from understanding, she actually knew nothing at all.

It was shortly before the mid-morning recess on Wednesday that Ms. Keane received a call on her mobile phone. She usually switched it off when she was at school, so that classes would not be disrupted, but some impulse had led her to leave it operational today. With the class looking on with interest, she answered the call.

'Hello, Blossom?' said the caller.

'No. Who is this?' replied Ms. Keane.

'Is that you Blossom?'

'No, this is Ms. Keane. Is that the Mayor?'

'No, I don't want the Mayor, I want Blossom.'

'Just a minute Mayor,' said Ms. Keane. She passed the telephone to Blossom.

'Hello, Mayor, this is Blossom,' said Blossom.

'Who? Is that Ms. Keane?' replied the Mayor.

'No, this is Blossom. Did you want something, Mayor?'

'I did want something, yes. Now what was it? Yes! A pizza! Oh, no, that was last night. Now, what was it? Give me a clue, Blossom.'

At this point, fortunately, Sara Bellum's voice came through.

'Blossom? Sorry, the Mayor is having one of his less than lucid days today. He has some difficulty understanding that he has to phone you on the normal telephone rather than the hot line. We need your help urgently. Apparently some sort of creature has come out of the river and has attacked people. Hurry, girls!'

Blossom pressed the button to terminate the call and handed the phone back to Ms. Keane.

'Well?' said Buttercup, impatiently.

'There's some sort of monster attacking the city,' said Blossom, flatly.

'Well, let's go!'

'Yeah, I suppose. Is it all right if we go and fight the monster, Ms. Keane?' asked Blossom without enthusiasm.

'Er… Well, yes, of course,' replied Ms. Keane, astonished.

Bubbles and Buttercup stood up to crash their way out of the classroom in the normal fashion, but to their surprise, Blossom floated slowly across the room. They followed and the three of them left the classroom _by the door_. As usual, once outside they soared into the sky, but very soon Buttercup, once again out in front and keen to get to grips with the monster, noticed that Blossom was lagging behind.

'Hey!' she shouted, 'What are you doing? Come on!'

Blossom caught up a little, but soon dropped back again. Somehow, the fact that she was a Powerpuff Girl, and was setting out again, as so many times before, to rid her town of evil, had lost its lustre. She had built her life around this role – or, at least, her life_ had been built _around this role – and, suddenly, it didn't mean anything to her. Out of the blue, the feeling that had buoyed her up and made her life seem so worthwhile had fallen away almost unnoticed like a lost handkerchief, and the strange thing was that even now she felt no sense of loss. She had spent the whole of that rainy, miserable Tuesday trying to hold onto something that she knew in her heart had already gone, and the final acceptance of its absence was more of a relief than anything else, a relief that brought on only a general feeling of apathy. Saving Townsville had become a chore, something that overnight had become a part of her past, something she would rather forget.

Buttercup led the way in the search for the reported monster. Following the course of the river, the girls flew over Townsville's newly-redeveloped business district, a part of the city that that so hemmed in the water with towers and skyscrapers that it scarcely seemed to have room to breathe, and left it looking more like a tame canal than a river. It was a very impersonal, some might say inhuman, part of the city, with such open spaces as still existed there left merely to enhance visitors' impressions of the corporate opulence of the crystal glass towers. It was not an area that encouraged casual bystanders, so when the girls spotted a crowd of people in one of the open squares, a crowd that seemed to be gathered around a dark blob on the ground, they swooped down to investigate. When they landed, they could see that the blob was clearly a human body, covered by a coat.

'Powerpuff Girls!' shouted a policeman.

The crowd turned to look at the three little girls.

'Somebody's been killed,' continued the policeman, running over to the girls, 'Some horrible sort of monster seems to have done it, though the only witnesses we have only caught a glimpse of it. Do you think you can find it and stop it?'

'Of course,' said Buttercup, 'There's no monster we can't handle.'

'What shall we do, Blossom?' asked Bubbles.

Blossom shrugged. 'Look for clues, I suppose,' she said.

'Let's take a look at the body,' said Buttercup, casting a puzzled glance at Blossom.

'I don't think that'd be a good idea,' said the policeman, 'It's… not very nice.'

'We can take it,' said Buttercup, folding her arms, 'We've seen some things in our time.'

'Well, if you're sure…'

The policeman, looking very uncertain, took the girls over to the body. With the crowd looking on in morbid fascination, he pulled back the overcoat that had been draped over the corpse. There was a collective gasp of horror from the crowd. Bubbles put her arms to her face and quickly looked away. Buttercup turned a shade of green and swallowed hard. Blossom was horrified by what she saw, but couldn't take her eyes from the ghastly face of the corpse. The man's head was bloated and swollen, covered in black and purple blotches as if he'd been beaten to death; but that wasn't all. Parts of his skin had split and protruding through was a bulbous, slimy green vegetable-like material covered in spines, like some sort of disgusting cactus. Even as they watched, there was movement there, as if this horrible thing were alive.

'Do you know what it is?' asked the policeman, putting the coat back over the ghastly remains of the victim, 'Have you seen anything like this before?'

Buttercup shook her head.

'No,' said Blossom, collecting her wits, 'But it's got to be stopped. Girls, look over there!'

She pointed across the square, to where yet another skyscraper was under construction. Around the building site, a high screen made of plywood sheets had been erected, and on this screen Blossom's super-sensitive vision had detected a faint mark. The other girls saw it too.

'It's a sort of slime trail,' said Buttercup.

'Ugh!' said Bubbles, who was feeling sick.

'I know it's horrible, girls, but we've got to stop this thing before it kills anyone else,' said Blossom.

The three little girls glanced at one another briefly for moral support, then flew across the square and up over the fence. Behind was a typical building site scene, a wilderness of churned-up sandy-coloured mud surrounding a tall tower which was being constructed in concrete. Strangely, there seemed to be no-one about. Enormous yellow machines stood idle, piles of sand and gravel patiently awaited use, a bonfire of odd scraps and lengths of wood piled jack-straw fashion crackled and smoked, and a small concrete mixer chugged and turned, unattended. Apart from the mixer there was no movement and no sound of activity. The girls glanced at one another again before concentrating on the trail. Their super vision made the creature's slime, which was apparently invisible to everyone else, stand out in a vivid green as if fluorescent, and it was thus easy to see where the monster had gone. The trail followed a more-or-less straight course from the fence across the mud, through puddles and over the deep tyre tracks made by heavy machinery, into the partially-completed building.

'OK,' said Blossom, taking a deep breath, 'We'll have to go in.'

Tentatively, the three girls entered the ground floor of the building, their eyes darting to and fro. The interior was dark, cavernous and echoing, a great empty space broken up only by the concrete pillars that supported the floors and by great, rectangular piles of construction materials, blocks and boards and timbers. The outside walls, which would eventually be glass, were boarded up for safety, and the only illumination was provided by the temporary strip lamps that the builders had left, which created rather eerie islands of cold, bluish-white light in the blackness. The slime trail meandered around the pillars and the piles of materials, and made its way up a cold and reverberating concrete stairway, becoming fainter and fainter all the time. Eventually, when the girls reached the sixth floor, the trail petered out completely into the cement dust of the floor. They hovered near the entrance, peering cautiously into the dim interior.

'Well, unless it can fly, it's got to be here somewhere,' whispered Blossom.

'Could that be it?' whispered Bubbles in return, pointing to a strange series of regular, undulating marks made in the dust that covered the floor.

'Could be. Well done, Bubbles,' said Blossom.

Very carefully, her eyes half closed, Blossom peeked around the doorway. It was very dark, with just a tiny spear of light coming from a crack between the boards that covered the windows. There was a deep shadow in the corner that had an odd-looking shape about it, and Blossom flinched back when it crossed her mind that it might be _something_, lurking, waiting to spring upon them, but when she peeped back nervously again it was clear that there was nothing hiding there. Cautiously, twisting and turning to try to make sure that nothing could attack them from behind, the girls left the stairwell and entered the darkness of the sixth floor. There was only one light on, at the far end of the enormous room, and that small light was further diminished by a great stack of pipes, also at the far end, that cast an enormous shadow over most of the floor. A cold draught blew up the stairs and caused the girls to shiver. The only sound to be heard was the moaning of the wind and the faint rattle of the boards covering the windows. Straining to see, they began slowly to follow the strange marks that had been made in the dust. On one side was the regular, undulating pattern that Bubbles had first spotted; on the other, there was a long, wavering trail as if something had been dragged along the ground.

'What's that?' hissed Buttercup, pointing to the corner of the room. In the darkness behind some packing cases, down near the floor, a dark shape was moving, in and out, slowly and regularly like someone taking deep breaths.

'OK,' whispered Blossom, her body trembling, 'Move in. Carefully!'

Noiselessly, the three girls approached the packing cases. In the lead, Blossom let out a faint exclamation.

'It's just a piece of wood swinging in the wind,' she said, almost laughing. She touched the piece of plywood, as if to reassure herself and the others that there really was no danger. From behind them came a quiet scrabbling sound. All three girls turned in terror.

'Oh, shit! What was that?' exclaimed Buttercup.

The girls scanned the room. There was nothing to be seen.

'Buttercup!' whispered Blossom, 'Where'd you learn language like that?'

'I hate this!' hissed Buttercup, 'Why doesn't it just show itself?'

Suddenly, there was a noise again, a faint gurgling sound that came from behind the stack of pipes.

'Let's get this over with,' said Buttercup. Steeling themselves, the three girls darted across the room. 

'I know,' hissed Blossom, who had taken up a position behind one of the concrete support columns, 'If we pull away the supports, the pipes will come down and expose the monster without us having to get close. Then we can decide how to tackle it.'

'Good plan,' said Buttercup, who, with Bubbles, was hiding behind another of the columns. As scared as she was, Blossom could not help but notice that Buttercup must be feeling pretty frightened to admit that one of her plans might have some merit.

With her back to the concrete, Blossom peeped cautiously around the side of the column at the stack of pipes. At the bottom of the stack, there were two wooden wedges that were holding the whole thing up. She glanced across to Bubbles, who nodded, and the two of them darted forward and yanked the wedges out. As they dashed away, the pipes came crashing down with an enormous, ringing metallic clatter that echoed painfully and disorientatingly from the walls, floor and ceiling, and went rolling across the floor in all directions. From the other side of the room, the girls could see that there was no monster, just the figure of a man lying on the floor. 

'Quick, he needs help,' exclaimed Blossom.

The girls shot across the room to where the man was lying, face down.

'Is he still alive?' asked Buttercup, dropping down to kneel at the man's side. As she said these words, the man groaned and turned his head to look at her. 

'All right,' she said, tenderly, placing her arm on the man's shoulders.

The man grimaced and rolled slightly onto his side. With great effort, he pulled his arm out from under his body. The girls looked in horror. The whole of the man's arm was bloated, his swollen fingers reduced to mere claws, with the disgusting green cactus-like material breaking through sections of his skin.

'We have to get him to hospital,' said Blossom.

A piercing squeal shattered the silence. Just behind the girls, a great dark object plopped from the ceiling onto the floor. Bubbles let out a scream of terror which was itself more shocking than the action that had provoked it, and the other two girls followed suit. In a flash of blue, pink and green, they shot in an instant to three separate corners of the room.

A great, green, heaving, gelatinous mass was quivering on the floor beside the man. With a disgusting sucking sound, it raised itself heavily and slumped down again. In a series of such movements, it began to move across the floor towards the stairs. 

Buttercup was first to recover from the shock. Now that she could see what she was dealing with, her fright turned to anger. She flew out from her corner and prepared to deal the creature a mighty blow.

'Wait!' cried Bubbles.

'What?' snapped Buttercup.

'What if just _touching_ it does _that_ to you,' replied Bubbles, pointing to the injured man. The man let out a groan, and, with his face screwed up with pain, nodded as if to confirm Bubbles' hypothesis.

Thus thwarted, Buttercup cried out in frustration, 'Well, what are we going to do?'

'Laser it!' exclaimed Blossom, through gritted teeth.

Taking care to keep their distance, the girls positioned themselves around the creature, which was still heaving and slithering towards the door. Squinting, they each fired their laser vision, lighting up the room in a blaze of red. The monster flinched and seemed to contract in on itself, then reared up and let out a squeal of pain, great clouds of foul-smelling smoke billowing from its surface. Within seconds, it had evaporated, and the thing that had created such terror was no more. Still shaking with the horror of it, with suppressed laughter and with sheer relief, the three sisters hugged one another.

Coughing from the smoke, the girls carried the injured man out of the building and into the welcome sunshine. The inevitable crowd of onlookers had gathered, along with the emergency services, and an ambulance crew quickly darted forward and took the man from the girls, putting him on a stretcher before placing him in the ambulance and whisking him to hospital.

The girls were shattered. Blossom could feel a headache coming on, but there was no escape from the crowd that gathered round to congratulate them. Fortunately, though, as the minutes passed and there was nothing more to see, people began to drift away, until there was just one man left, a tall, middle-aged man dressed in a dark overcoat, a hat and a heavy muffler. Just as the girls had finished giving their story to the police, and were about to fly back home for some welcome rest, he stepped forward and introduced himself.

'Hello,' he said, rather awkwardly, as if he were not used to talking to children, 'My name is Mr. Matthews. I'm very interested in what you've just done.' He raised his hat politely. 'Here's my card.'

He held out a business card. On it was printed the name 'Hopkin I. Matthews, PhD.'

'I'm a scientist,' he continued, 'I'm taking a sabbatical at the moment – that's a kind of vacation – and I have a little base at the Hobbs Lane Community College. Perhaps you know it?'

The girls shook their heads.

'I've been studying the creature you've just killed for quite some time,' said Mr. Matthews.

'You knew about it?' asked Blossom, astonished.

'Oh, yes, I've done some quite in-depth research. In fact, I'd very much like to talk to you about it, and to Professor Utonium. Do you think the Professor would be willing to talk to me?'

'I'm sure he would, Mr. Matthews,' said Blossom, 'Would you like his telephone number?'

'I do believe I have the Professor's address somewhere, thank you very much. Perhaps we'll meet again soon. Goodbye.'

With that, Mr. Matthews raised his hat again and turned and walked away.

'Goodbye, Mr. Matthews,' called Blossom.


	8. Part 8

Part 8

The battle against the creature at the building site had exhausted the girls, even though the monster had, in the end, proved very easy to kill. None of them felt like returning to school, and even Blossom, who had on other occasions had to use all of her persuasive powers to prevent Bubbles and Buttercup from using their struggle against evil as an excuse for skipping classes, made no objection when Buttercup suggested that they go straight home.

'That was good,' said Buttercup, who had been reflecting on the morning's action as they flew home.

'I thought you hated it?' replied Blossom.

'No, it was exciting,' said Buttercup, bridling a little at the suggestion that she had been scared.

'Hm, yeah, exciting _now_,' thought Blossom; but she didn't say anything. She was feeling far too good herself. Her earlier doubts and misgivings had left her. To destroy such a horrible thing, to _save the day_, that was what being a Powerpuff Girl was all about, and it didn't matter if people thanked them for it. They could be happy simply in the knowledge that they had done a good thing. Blossom felt that the morning's frightening experience had lifted a great weight from her: it had made things a lot clearer, sorted out some priorities. Yes, she agreed with Buttercup: that had been good.

Bubbles was very quiet on the journey home, and Blossom put this down to the fact that she was tired and that the experience had been a bit frightening. When the three girls arrived home, however, Bubbles confided to Blossom that she was worried.

'What about?' asked Blossom.

'I'm worried about that monster we killed,' replied Bubbles, 'What if…'

At that moment Professor Utonium, disturbed by the noise of the girls returning, emerged from his laboratory. The three girls looked at him rather guiltily, knowing that they should be at school.

'Girls, what are you doing home?' asked the Professor.

'We had to fight a monster,' said Buttercup, proudly.

'It was in the centre of town, Professor,' added Blossom, 'it came out of the river and went into this building site and we had to go inside and it was all dark and we were trying to follow a trail and we lost it and there was this man there who was hurt and when we went to help him the monster jumped out on us and Buttercup nearly got hurt and we killed it with our laser vision.'

'And it was really frightening,' said Bubbles.

'And Blossom and Bubbles got scared so we had to come home,' added Buttercup, in retaliation for '_nearly got hurt'_.

'You got scared too,' said Bubbles.

'Did not!'

'You were the one who suggested we come home,' said Blossom.

'Only because I could see you were _scared,_' taunted Buttercup.

'That's not true, Professor,' said Blossom, indignantly, 'it _was_ scary, but Buttercup got frightened too.'

'All right, all right!' exclaimed the Professor, with a smile, 'I guess you can take the rest of the day off – sounds like you've earned it! Tell you what – why don't we go into town and get some burgers? That's just what brave little super heroes need after a tough fight!'

The Powerpuff Girls looked at one another in surprise.

'Don't you have any work to do, Professor?' asked Blossom.

'Oh, boring old work can wait!' replied Professor Utonium, with a laugh, 'Come on, race you to the car!'

The Professor drove the girls into Townsville to their favourite burger bar. A visit here was normally a treat reserved for their Saturday shopping expedition, and it was most unusual for the Professor to suggest that they make a special trip. He ordered the special kids' meals for the girls and a double cheeseburger for himself, and they sat at a table by the window to eat their impromptu lunch.

'Professor,' said Bubbles, after a short session of noisily blowing bubbles into her milkshake, 'I'm a bit worried about what we did today.'

The Professor, who had been doing a lot of fussing around, and chuckling, and making little comments to the other parents in the restaurant, and generally playing the proud father, looked up from his cheeseburger and smiled a rather patronising smile at Bubbles.

'Now, what's the matter with my little Bubbles?' he asked, winking at Buttercup, who was sitting opposite.

'I think we might have done the wrong thing by killing it,' replied Bubbles.

Buttercup let out a big sigh and pointedly folded her arms.

'What is the _matter_ with everyone these days?' she exclaimed, looking at the ceiling in exasperation.

'Why do you say that, Bubbles?' asked Blossom, leaning forward with interest.

'Well, we know that it hurt people by just touching them. What if it just touched people by accident, or if the people who were hurt touched it without knowing what it would do to them? It might not have been trying to hurt people at all.'

'Why did it attack us, then?' retorted Buttercup, belligerently.

'It _did_ jump out on us,' said Blossom.

'I think you were right to do what you did,' chipped in the Professor, 'I don't think you can afford to take any chances with a creature like that. You first duty is to protect Townsville, after all. And you must look after yourselves. I'd be devastated if anything happened to you.'

After this little talk, Bubbles perked up considerably, and the three little girls had an enjoyable meal. The Professor, especially, seemed to be in great spirits and insisted on the girls each having a piece of hot apple pie and ice cream. 

It was in the car on the way back home that Blossom remembered Mr Matthews.

'Professor,' she said, 'there was a man today who said he was a scientist and he was studying the monster we killed.' 

The Professor made a sudden, sharp correction to his steering. 

'Really?' he replied. 

'I thought he seemed a bit odd,' continued Blossom, 'I mean, if he was studying the monster, why didn't he warn people about it?' 

'Yes,' said Professor, 'that was very bad of him, if it's true. Perhaps he wasn't telling the truth.' 

Blossom didn't really understand why Mr Matthews should have lied; but if the Professor said it was possible then it must be so. She sat back in the seat quite contentedly for the remainder of the journey. 

When the Professor and the girls arrived back home, they discovered that there was a man waiting on their doorstep.

'Talk of the Devil!' exclaimed Blossom, 'That's Mr Matthews! He said he might come to see you, Professor.'

The Professor did not seem very pleased to see his visitor. He and the girls stepped out of the car. 

'Good afternoon. Professor Utonium?' inquired Matthews, once again raising his hat politely. He was dressed as the girls had seen him before, but this time was carrying a slim leather zip-up document case under his arm.

'Yes, that's me,' replied Professor Utonium, warily. 

'My name is Matthews. Perhaps you've heard of my researches? No? No matter. I have been conducting an extensive study of a very strange creature that has been inhibiting the sewers beneath Townsville for a number of years. Your, er... daughters... had something of a fight with the creature this morning. As a renowned geneticist yourself, I'm sure you would be very interested in my findings. I thought I might take this opportunity to discuss them with you? I'd be very interested to get the opinion of someone as highly qualified and respected as yourself.' 

'Ah, well, I'm quite busy at present,' replied the Professor. 

'I'm sure I won't take you from your work for very long. It is a unique study, of a creature quite unknown to science. Surely your curiosity must be piqued, Professor?'

Mr Matthews smiled a broad smile and looked the Professor directly in the eyes.

'Yes, well, of course, it sounds very interesting,' said the Professor, haltingly. Rather uncertainly, he extended his arm and the two men shook hands. 'Where did you say you were from?' he asked. 

'I am currently attached to Hobbs Lane Community College,' replied Matthews. 

'I've never heard of it.' 

'It is very small, but provides me with a base and a laboratory assistant. I always think that a good lab assistant is vital to any research, don't you agree?' 

'I... find I get by quite well without one,' replied the Professor. 

'Yes, of course. May we go in?' 

Professor Utonium unlocked the front door and he, Mr Matthews and the girls entered the house. 

'Why don't you go upstairs and play while I talk to Mr Matthews?' said the Professor to the girls. 

'Oh no, please,' interrupted Matthews, 'I would like the girls to stay, if you don't mind. After all, they have played a significant part in my research, if only by bringing it to an end.' 

Mr Matthews beamed a wide, toothy smile upon the girls, who smiled guilelessly in return. After a little hesitation, the Professor opened the door to the living room and invited Mr Matthews to go in. The girls followed. 

'Please take a seat, Mr Matthews,' said the Professor. 

Mr Matthews removed his heavy overcoat and scarf and laid them over the back of an armchair. He sat down, still clutching the document case, and the girls and the Professor followed suit. 

'Well, no point in beating about the bush, Professor Utonium,' said Matthews, in a rather didactic tone, 'I first discovered the creature that your… daughters… killed today some - let me see - twelve years ago. Good Lord! How time does fly! I was doing some analysis of water quality and found some very strange chemicals being discharged into the river here in Townsville. I did some investigation and, to cut a long story short, I discovered a very peculiar creature living in the sewers. You know, curiously enough back then it didn't look anything like the monster you saw today, girls.' 

'What did it look like?' asked Blossom, fascinated. 

'Very like a human being,' replied Mr Matthews, 'In fact, I took a photograph. Would you like to see?' 

He unzipped the case he was holding and from it pulled a Polaroid. He handed it to the Professor, who glanced at it very briefly and, with some reluctance, passed it to Buttercup. Buttercup in turn passed it on, first to Bubbles, then to Blossom. The photograph was of poor quality and had obviously been taken with a flash. There was little to see, most of the picture being dark, with no obvious structures visible, just slight gradations in the blackness that hinted at the possibility of objects, but in the bottom right-hand corner there was a clear shape, highlighted by the flash, a mark that might have been part of the torso, shoulder and arm of something vaguely human.

'I don't understand,' said Blossom, handing the photograph back to Mr Matthews.

'It seemed clear to me that this creature was in fact a human being, one that had undergone some terrible mutation,' replied Matthews. 

'That's horrible!' said Bubbles, appalled. 

'Over the months following my first sighting, I attempted to make contact with the creature,' continued Mr Matthews, 'It was very elusive and difficult to track down, but I was able eventually to find it and communicate with it in a very rudimentary way. This was, of course, before it lost all vestiges of its human characteristics.' 

'Did you discover how it came to be in such a condition?' asked the Professor. 

Frowning, Blossom looked at the Professor, puzzled by the cold manner in which he had said these words. 

'No, I was never able to make any sense of the creature's attempts to explain its history,' replied Matthews, 'It was in a very highly charged emotional state, and tried to avoid me as much as possible. However, with perseverance I was able to begin to understand something about it. It had already killed several times. A number of vagrants, winos and drop-outs had fallen victim to the creature, quite unnoticed by the city authorities. Perhaps you may also remember, Professor, the disappearance of a little girl around that time, last seen on wasteland near the river. What an outcry there was over that! Hundreds of people turned out to help with the search. Perhaps you were one of them?' 

'I can't remember that at all,' replied the Professor. 

'All that was ever found of her was the little knitted toy rabbit she had been carrying. Suspicion, if I recall correctly, did fall upon one man, who was hounded out of town and, I believe, committed suicide. Nothing was ever proved, though. The reason being, of course, that he had nothing whatever to do with it. The child fell victim to the creature, sad to say. I imagine the parents are still waiting for their little girl to come home.' 

'Why didn't you say something, if you knew what had happened?' asked the Professor through pursed lips, all the while directing a steely glare at Mr Matthews. 

'It was some time after the abduction that I found out for certain what had happened. And I had good reason for keeping quiet, as you will see. As I began to contact the creature more and more, I began to understand something of the horror that had overtaken it. It had indeed once been a man, a human being, until this blight or plague descended upon it. As he slowly succumbed to the infection - or whatever it was - the man inside that deformed body could only look on with mounting horror and disgust as his own actions began to appal him. An unstoppable, base lust for human flesh seized him whilst his moral conscience remained intact. He was in torment as these inhuman desires controlled his actions whilst his human mind was repelled by what he had become.' 

'That's just awful,' said Blossom. 

'Do you think he was still... in there?' said Bubbles, asking a question Blossom had feared to express. 

'The man, the human being, still inside the thing you destroyed today?' answered Mr Matthews. 'I couldn't tell. Eventually it became impossible to communicate. Whether there was still a human mind trapped in that obscene body I suppose we shall never know.' 

'How on earth'd he get like that?' asked Buttercup. 

'It is difficult to say,' replied Matthews, 'I'm inclined to think there must have been some sort of accident. Of course, we have an expert here! Professor Utonium, you must have some ideas on how such a thing might happen?'

'I couldn't really say,' replied the Professor, 'without genetic material from the creature to examine.'

'You cannot make any suggestions? No hypotheses?'

'I prefer not to speculate,' said Professor Utonium, folding his arms, 'Speculation without adequate evidence can lead one into serious trouble.'

'The course. A tenet that I'm sure you've taught your pretty... children.'

'Unfortunately, the girls tell me that they destroyed the creature completely. Not a trace left.'

'Yes. Yes, that is unfortunate. A mystery, then, that perhaps will never be solved. Well,' Matthews zipped up his document case and got to his feet, 'I mustn't detain you any longer, Professor. I had hoped that you might be able to shed some light on a strange affair - with your expert knowledge - but as you say, it's best not to argue in the absence of facts. Thank you for your time.'

Mr Matthews put on his coat and scarf, picked up his hat and prepared to leave.

'Do you intend to pursue your research any further?' asked the Professor, as he held open the front door.

Mr Matthews, who had paused on the doorstep to muffle himself against the cold, turned to face the Professor and the girls.

'Oh yes,' he replied, 'it's far too interesting a subject to abandon. Who knows, maybe I'll be able to find some of that genetic material. I shall certainly let you know if I do.'

He stepped outside. 

'Thank you again, Professor. Perhaps we'll meet again. I hope you'll peruse my paper when I finally publish. I don't know whether the world is ready for such a startling story, but I'm sure _you_ will find it interesting. Goodbye.'

He tipped his hat and walked away.

'What a horrible story!' said Bubbles, as the Professor closed the front door.

'We killed him,' said Blossom, rather sadly, 'We just went in and killed him, just because we were frightened.'

'He _was_ killing people,' said Buttercup.

'Now girls,' interrupted the Professor, 'don't take what Mr Matthews said too seriously. Don't forget that even if this monster was a person once, it obviously wasn't a person when you saw it.'

'But it might have been, on the inside,' piped up Bubbles.

'Yes, Professor,' said Blossom 'You said we shouldn't kill things just because they're yucky on the outside. But that's what we did, really.' 

'It was killing people!' repeated Buttercup.

'Yes, but it didn't _want_ to,' replied Blossom, 'You heard what Mr Matthews said. He said the man hated what he was doing but couldn't help it.'

'That assumes that what Mr Matthews said was true,' interjected the Professor, 'We don't have any evidence for that. And don't forget, girls, it's your duty to protect Townsville. It doesn't matter even if what Matthews said was true - the monster was killing people, and that's the most important thing.'

Blossom looked at the Professor in surprise.

'But if he didn't _want_ to kill people, Professor...'

'He _did_ kill people, Blossom, and that's all that matters,' retorted the Professor, sharply. 'Now,' he continued, looking very sternly at Blossom, 'I really think we've heard enough about Mr Matthews and his unsubstantiated theories. Let's just leave it at that, shall we?'

With that, the Professor turned on his heels and marched off to his laboratory. As Blossom watched him stomp away she felt her heart start to pound and she began to shake. She had upset the Professor and she didn't understand why. Distraught, she looked at her sisters. Bubbles smiled a wan little smile.

'See,' said Buttercup, 'A monster is a monster.' 


	9. Part 9

Part 9

Blossom was on edge all evening. Whilst she and her sisters sat in the living room, she made sure that the door was left open so that she could see if the Professor came out of his laboratory. Whilst Buttercup and Bubbles watched TV, her thoughts were on the Professor and what he had said, and what _she_ had said.

When the clock ticked around to 7:30, she stood up.

'Right, girls, time for bed!'

'What?' exclaimed Buttercup, outraged at the suggestion.

'It's 7:30. Bedtime.'

'Since when? We never go to bed at this time!'

'Only because the Professor lets us stay up later, sometimes. He's not here, so we should go up at the proper time.'

'You must be kidding! He's not here, so we can stay up as long as we like!'

'Buttercup, don't argue,' snapped Blossom, angrily.

The ferocity of this retort was so startling, and the furious glint in Blossom's eyes so unexpected, that Buttercup found herself obeying almost against her will. Sulkily, muttering to herself, she went upstairs. Blossom took a last look at the door to the lab before she to went to bed, but it was firmly shut and there was no sign that the Professor would be coming out.

Blossom lay awake most of the night. Normally, if he didn't tuck them into bed, the Professor at least looked in on the girls when he came up to bed himself, but Blossom heard him climbing the stairs well past midnight and listened to his footsteps pass the bedroom door, and heard the soft thump of his own bedroom door shutting. Her heart sank even further. Angry tears welled up in her eyes. Why was he doing this? What had she done? Even if he was upset at _her_, there was no need take it out on Buttercup and Bubbles. He might at least have said goodnight to _them_. She stifled with her pillow the little sobs of pain and frustration that she could not suppress from convulsing her small body; she didn't want to wake Bubbles and Buttercup, didn't want them to see her like this, even though her instinct was naturally to turn to them for support. As the night wore on, she began to be less concerned about what she had done to annoy the Professor than about his behaviour towards her. It wasn't fair! She began to think about retaliation. If he wanted to be like that, then so could she! For a while, she lay there with the covers pulled up over her head tormenting herself with imagined ways that she might snub the Professor. How many situations did she conjure up where he needed her and she ignored him? How many times did she turn her back on him as he pleaded for her forgiveness? Her chin quivering with anger and frustration, she faced him down a dozen times with a haughty expression and the satisfaction of knowing that she was in the right and he was hurting as he had hurt her. But Blossom found there was no satisfaction in hurting the Professor. The more slights and pain she inflicted upon him in her imaginary world, the more unutterably lonely and empty she felt herself. Tears trickled down her face and wet her pillow.

Bubbles made pancakes for breakfast the following morning. Blossom was terribly tired and subdued, her eyes bloodshot with lack of sleep and with crying. The girls had their breakfast virtually in silence, and there was no sign of the Professor. Just as they prepared to leave for school, however, there came the sound of footsteps descending the stairs, and Professor Utonium entered the kitchen. He was wearing a dressing gown and it was clear that he had just got up. His hair was lank and unkempt, his face unshaven, and his eyes were as red as Blossom's. 

Blossom continued to prepare for school, refusing even to turn round and acknowledge the Professor's presence. Utonium stood just inside the doorway and looked at each of the girls in turn, his eyes lingering on Blossom's back as she placed the dirty dishes into the sink.

'Girls,' he said, 'I need to talk to you.'

Blossom's heart began to pound. She turned, to find the Professor looking directly at her. The expression on his face was one of worry, and there was in his tired eyes almost a pleading look that touched Blossom's heart and evaporated in an instant all her foolish ideas of cold-shouldering him.

'We were just going to school,' she said, smiling.

The Professor rubbed his eyes and massaged his temples with the forefinger and thumb of one hand, as if he were suffering from a terrible headache.

'I really must speak to you,' he said, in a hoarse voice, 'I'll give you a note to give to Ms. Keane.'

He pulled one of the kitchen chairs out from under the table and slumped down on it. The girls sat down too. 

'I haven't slept all night,' he said, 'Actually, I've been worried for several days. Girls, I have to tell you the truth about that creature you killed yesterday. You see... I knew all about it.'

'Were you doing research, like Mr Matthews?' asked Bubbles.

'No, Bubbles, I wasn't doing any research,' replied the Professor wearily, 'It all started a long time ago.' 

He paused, staring at the table. The girls waited. Professor Utonium took a deep breath.

'I did a lot of work on the ageing process,' he said, glancing very briefly at each of the girls, 'I wanted to see if I could halt it, even reverse it. I believed I'd made a breakthrough. I was certain that I had the key to allowing people to live many times as long as normal, possibly even extending their lives indefinitely. It was a very exciting idea.'

It had indeed been a thrilling time for Professor Utonium. It had been shortly after he arrived in Townsville that his earlier researchers had begun to bear fruit. His experiments with flies had been a mixed success, some of the insects living ten times their natural lifespan or more, some being destroyed by genetic defects, but they had led him to what he believed was a fundamental breakthrough. Many months of puzzling over data until his head hurt, of doodling equations and chemical structures, of reading research paper after research paper in search of inspiration, had culminated in one of those _eureka_ moments when suddenly everything was as clear as day and the Professor cursed himself for missing something so obvious that a child might have seen it. He remembered that moment, when he had literally jumped for joy, skipping around his lab like a child. He had been so excited, so elated, that he had gone out, for the first time in weeks, and treated himself to a meal in a restaurant.

It had been on the way back from that meal that the Professor had bumped into Simon for the first time. Striding along the sidewalk, his head filled with the words of the paper that he was to unleash upon a bedazzled world, he had initially ignored the scruffy individual who mumbled at him as he passed. However, Utonium was feeling good about himself and about the world, for the first time in a very long while, and a foolish sort of benevolence caused him to pause and apologise. He had been in one of those moods that he always regretted afterwards, when he was stupid enough to be friendly to people and which always seem to end with him looking small and the rest of the world laughing at his expense. There had been no danger of that from Simon, though. Just to have someone acknowledge his existence had been a rare privilege for the beggar. Taking his customary subservient stance, staring bent-headed at the pavement, he had plied the Professor in a slurred monotone for the price of a room at a nearby hostel, and Utonium, in an excess of goodwill, had offered to stand him a drink at a bar that was just across the street.

It had only been later on that, with some shame, Utonium had admitted the truth to himself: he had just needed someone to talk to. Oddly, it was that necessity, rather than the fact that this total stranger had been the only person in the world that he could turn to, that caused his shame. It was a weakness, like the sentimentalism that had also played its part in prompting the Professor to take the beggar for a drink. He had been moved, in a somewhat superficial way, by the man's plight and it had pleased him to think even better of himself by performing this small, unasked-for act of kindness. The upshot of it was, that the professor and the beggar had found themselves passing the time of day over a few glasses of beer. Simon had been gratitude itself and could not praise the Professor enough, and Utonium had patronised the man, sagely lamenting the iniquities of a society that could leave a man homeless and penniless. One beer had led to another and Utonium had awoken the following morning with the knowledge that he had allowed the Beggar to sleep on his couch.

The Professor had tip-toed downstairs nursing a terrible hangover and a consciousness of his own stupidity. He counted himself lucky not to have had his throat cut in his sleep. He had certainly expected to find his house ransacked. Instead, he had merely found a note written in a childish hand thanking him profusely for his hospitality. It had made Professor Utonium feel very, very pleased with himself.

A few days later, late one wet evening, there had come a ring at Professor Utonium's doorbell and Simon had been there, looking very bedraggled. He had been turned out of his room at the hostel, he had nowhere to go and he would never normally have presumed upon the Professor's hospitality again and he would be very content to sleep on the Professor's garage floor, if that was convenient. Having had time to reflect on what he perceived to be his prior foolishness, the Professor had by now ceased to feel good about his generosity and looked back upon his previous encounter with the beggar with some embarrassment. He now felt that he had been acting out of character, that his friendliness and generosity had been out of proportion, that they made him look feeble and gullible. He had not, therefore, been best pleased to be reminded of the incident. Nevertheless, it was impossible for him to turn the man away, so with a feeling that he was perhaps getting into something rather deeper than he liked, he had invited Simon into the house and made a bed on the couch for a second time, with many subtle hints that this was for _one night only_.

Simon was a very simple fellow, little more than a child, mentally, and he showed such an affecting gratitude and awe of the Professor that Utonium could not help but feel very good in his company. After so long with the world seeming to be against him at every turn, Utonium bathed in the comfort of Simon's unquestioning adoration even though a small voice within his head had tried to point out that the beggar's compliments were worthless to him.

'The upshot was, I took Simon on as my first lab assistant,' said the Professor.

'Before Jojo?' asked Buttercup.

'Long before Jojo,' replied the Professor.

Like Jojo who succeeded him, Simon's role had really been as a companion, not an assistant. Indeed, like Jojo, he did not have the intelligence to carry out any other than the simplest of tasks. What he did have though, was a blind faith in the Professor.

'I don't think many people had shown him much kindness in all his life,' said Professor Utonium, 'He believed in me, and I did a dreadful thing. I took advantage of his gratitude - and of his simple nature.'

'You asked him to be in one of your experiments,' said Bubbles, perceptively.

'It was worse than that, Bubbles,' replied the Professor, 'I didn't ask him; I just kept saying how difficult it was working with animals and how you could never rely on the results, how they don't always translate to humans. It was underhand. I wanted him to volunteer - and he did.'

'What happened?' asked Blossom, although she already knew the answer.

What had happened had been horrifying. At first, everything seemed to have gone to plan. Simon had spent about a day under sedation following the Professor's treatment, and all his vital signs were normal. It was only when he awoke that it became clear that something strange had happened. The lively individual who had volunteered for the Professor's experiment had been replaced by morose character who refused either to speak or move.

'When I touched his skin, it was like touching stone,' continued Professor Utonium, 'Every muscle in his body seemed to be tensed to its limit. That was disturbing, but it was his face that really worried me. Just like the rest of him, it was solid and unmoving - except for the eyes. His eyes followed me about the lab. Sometimes I'd turn around suddenly and he'd be watching like some animal stalking its prey. It was terrifying. I didn't know what do.'

The Professor had been on his own. He could hardly have taken the unfortunate Simon to hospital. For several days he had tried to break the terrible spell that seemed to have cast a shadow over his erstwhile assistant, then one morning he had entered the lab to find Simon gone.

'Not only that,' said Professor Utonium to the girls, 'he had broken into my cupboards and there were several bottles missing. I can't be sure, but I think it's likely that he ate the chemicals they contained. I went out looking for him but there was no trace. I looked in all of the places where I thought he might have gone - hostels, cheap hotels, all the places where down-and-outs might be found, but he wasn't there. After about a week, though, some of the people there started to mention disappearances. These people – vagrants – weren't in the places they'd expect to find them. Something told me there was a connection. No…' 

The Professor leant on the kitchen table, his head in his hands.

'No, that's not true. I _knew_ there was a connection. I knew that my experiment had gone wrong.'

Blossom looked at Professor Utonium. He seemed to be falling apart. There had been numerous occasions when she and her sisters had had to rescue him from dangerous and often terrifying situations, but he had never been like this. He had always managed, in her eyes at least, to keep an air of inner strength about him, a strength that came from his intense sense of purpose, which was to understand and ultimately to control the forces that he saw around him and which impinged upon him. That desire to understand seemed to give him a power and a dignity in any situation. Yet, looking at him now, Blossom could see nothing of that. What struck her most was how suddenly _old_ he looked. She looked at the little scene - the Professor slumped in his chair, Bubbles looking on with bright eyes, ready to cry at any minute, Buttercup in a confusion of emotions - with strange detachment. The Professor's age had never struck her before, he had always seemed so dynamic, so youthful in his outlook.

__

This isn't the Professor, she thought.

'What about the little girl?' asked Buttercup.

The Professor gave a great sigh and seemed almost to deflate before the girls' eyes, slumping even further in his chair.

'That was much later,' he replied, after a few seconds, 'I tried... I searched...'

'Why didn't you tell someone?' asked Blossom, coldly.

'I thought I could stop him. I _did_ stop him! After the girl went missing I finally tracked him down, in the sewers. I realised that I could use his modified chemical structure to trail him. I formed a theory that it was a shortage of a particular chemical in his body that was causing the craving that prompted him to attack people. By supplying that chemical to him, the attacks stopped. By putting a small quantity of the chemical into the sewers every week, I was able to keep him under control. After a while, I found that the chemical was no longer being taken so I thought he had either died or gone away. I thought I'd heard the last of him. Then last week, there was a little article in the newspaper that mentioned more disappearances. More beggars and drop-outs – the kind of people that Simon knew. I was afraid… I think I knew that he'd come back. _More_ deaths, _more_ killings… '

The Professor looked up at the girls.

'You see, I've had this on my conscience for a long time,' he said, 'In a way, I suppose it was fitting that _you_ brought it to an end.'

'That Mr Matthews knew more about it than he said,' observed Buttercup, 'I thought there was something fishy about him!'

'Yes, replied the Professor, 'I think he did. Somehow he must have found out my involvement. Perhaps he was able to get more out of the creature than he told us. ' 

Slowly, the Professor got to his feet.

'I think I'm going to have a bath now, girls,' he said, 'I'm really rather tired. I might see you at the school, later,' he added, 'I have to talk to Ms. Keane. Have a nice time and look after yourselves.'

He turned very quickly and left the room in a hurry. Bubbles and Buttercup looked at one another and then at Blossom. Blossom was silent.

It's not the Professor, she thought. This isn't what I want him to be. _My_ Professor doesn't do things like that. My Professor… But he wasn't _her_ Professor. He was just Professor Utonium, someone she hardly knew. The implications of what he had said were frightening, horrifying, disgusting. For a moment she felt like screaming: _"I'm a five-year-old! You made me a five-year-old, you bastard, and you give me things like this to deal with!"_

Shocked, Blossom looked across at her sisters. They were still looking at her with a stunned expression on their faces. They hadn't noticed anything. Of course, they hadn't heard what she had thought. She had heard criminals use far worse language than that a thousand times, but she would never have dreamt of saying such a thing herself. Until now. What was happening to her?

'I don't feel like going to school,' said Buttercup.

'Me neither,' said Bubbles.

'We have to go,' replied Blossom, her voice sounding to her sisters strangely mechanical, 'I think the Professor wants some time to himself.'

'Yeah, I suppose,' said Buttercup.

'I think he thinks Mr. Matthews is going to tell the police,' said Blossom, still in the flat, distant tone, 'That's why he wants to talk to Ms. Keane. He wants to talk about _us_ – about what's going to happen to us if he gets put in prison.'

Bubbles began to cry, very quietly.

'I don't want him to go to prison,' she whispered, through her tears.

Blossom wasn't at all sure what _she_ wanted.

'We've… got each other,' she said, although it didn't sound enough.

As Buttercup opened the front door so that the three of them could start on their journey to school, Bubbles looked at Blossom.

'Blossom,' she said, her voice so choked that her sisters had difficulty understanding her, 'The Professor created that monster. That means…'

'Don't say it, Bubbles,' said Blossom, 'Leave it.'

'Leave what?' asked Buttercup, frowning.

'Nothing,' replied Blossom, 'Just Bubbles being silly.'

As the girls flew towards Pokey Oaks, Blossom couldn't leave it. In all the horror of the Professor's story, what it had revealed about the Professor himself, what he was capable of, his deception, was the final insult: what he had done to them, the girls, what he had turned them into. The Professor had created the monster. That made it their own brother. They had killed their own brother.


	10. Part 10

Part 10

'Blossom.' 

'Blossom!' 

'Bubbles, would you please ask your sister if she'd mind paying attention?' 

Bubbles nudged Blossom in the ribs. 

'What?' asked Blossom, irritated.

Bubbles glanced towards the front of the class, where Ms Keane was standing with her arms folded and a particularly annoyed expression on her face. Blossom followed Bubbles' eyes with her own and realised with a start that she was the centre of attention in the class.

'Ah, Blossom! Sorry to wake you!' said Ms Keane, her lips pursed in a sardonic expression, 'Perhaps you'd like to join us?'

'Oh, yes, sorry Ms Keane,' replied Blossom, somewhat distantly. 

'We were adding some numbers together,' continued Ms Keane, 'Four and seven.'

'Eleven,' replied Blossom, without thinking.

'Yes, well, very good. And five and eight?'

'Thirteen,' came the immediate reply.

'That's very good, Blossom, but please pay attention. Now, your turn Billy Lipowitz...' 

Ms Keane's voice faded into the background again. That was one of the benefits of being clever. A couple of snappy answers could compensate for a lot of daydreaming.

School was, in truth, the last place that Blossom wanted to be. Her head was pounding and there was a horrible sick feeling in her stomach, and she didn't need Ms. Keane asking stupid questions. It had taken all of her good sense and self-control not to snap "What do you want?" at her teacher just then. She felt as though she never wanted to speak to anyone ever again, as if the strain of listening to one more voice added to the clamour already going on in her head would cause her skull to burst. Round and round her thoughts went the Professor's story, and each circuit seemed to drain a little more of _something_ – Spirit, Hope, Self Esteem, call it what you will – from her body. She had believed in him, she had built her life around what she believed him to be and what she thought he wanted. His approval, the idea that she was living her life the way he would want her to, the way he would live it himself, had been her central, overriding aspiration. How many times had she felt herself so low for falling short of that ideal? That sham? And now… What was there left? Only the knowledge that he had let her and her sisters kill their own brother.

__

Their own brother. That was a notion that perhaps might be difficult to explain to Ms. Keane, or indeed to any of her school friends. That blob, that oozing bag of green slime, Blossom's brother? The Powerpuff Girls had many attributes that ordinary people envied - their enormous strength, their ability to fly, their agelessness, to name but a few - but ordinary people had something that the Girls didn't. They had a sense of Family, a real sense of having a connection with the past and with the world around them through the blood ties with their relatives. Even if they weren't conscious of them, those connections were there. Even orphans and adoptees at least had the knowledge that somewhere, at some time, they had had those ties, that they fitted in, in some way, with the society and the people around them; they might not know what the ties were, but they at least had the certainty that they existed. Ordinary people weren't dropped into the world from nowhere. The Girls' only relatives were each other. The Professor had created them, but though Blossom had always looked up to him as a father, she could see now that he could not fulfil that role in any true sense; he was not 'family'. The creature at the building site had been created by the Professor too, and that was something that struck a much deeper chord. Perhaps, she thought, she had within her, unnoticed all this time, a yearning for that sense of a proper, physical connection with the rest of the world, something more solid than the knowledge that she had been created in an instant by a reaction in the Professor's lab. If so, that dormant yearning had been activated by the Professor's confession: activated just too late, activated when she had already killed the only being that, aside from her beloved sisters, she could count as a part of her family.

Killing monsters was something Blossom had been doing all her life, and she had never had cause to feel anything other than satisfaction in that task. But she didn't feel satisfied now. She felt sickened. She felt worse than she had ever felt about anything in her life. She felt that everyone was looking at her, that they could see what she had done, that it was somehow written in her eyes or visible in her body language. She could feel them passing judgement upon her, could feel their reproachful glances. They weren't accusing her or attacking her, it was far worse than that. They were quietly disgusted by her. They were whispering to one another, how disgraceful it was to have someone like that in their midst, someone they had trusted, someone they had thought was like _them_, how awful it was to find there was such a creature, such a degraded, barbaric creature, living amongst them and pretending to be a civilised human being. She had let them down. She had alienated herself from the people she knew and loved by the depravity of what she had done.

Of course, no one was looking at Blossom. Ms Keane was still going around the class with her arithmetic questions, and all that lady saw was a little girl, her star pupil, strangely quiet and distracted in a lesson she normally liked to show off in. Blossom stared out of the window, but though the light from the crisp winter day entered her eyes she saw nothing of the scene outside.

Perhaps the only comfort Blossom could take - and it wasn't much - was from the thought that, if what Mr. Matthews had said was true, then perhaps the creature that she had killed might think itself better off dead than in the condition that it was living. Not, that is, its physical condition: although she had been initially repelled by the form of the monster, now that she recognised it as a sort of relative, its physical appearance didn't seem to matter. After all, she and her sisters weren't really human. They were monsters too, in a way. No, it was the creature's mental condition that Blossom was thinking about. She supposed that it must have felt much as she did now, only worse, if that were possible. The Professor had not said much about Simon, the unfortunate beggar, but Blossom drew a picture of him in her mind as a simple, innocent, good hearted soul, reduced to a sub-human level and forced to endure his own evil in a kind of living hell. All because of an accident. What had the Professor been thinking of, to do such a thing? Could anything be worth the risk of destroying someone like that? Was there really any End that might justify such a Means? The secret of Eternal Life, that was what the Professor had been seeking. The more Blossom thought about it, the more it seemed a stupid, selfish thing to want. What if he had succeeded and everyone could live for ever? What would the world be like? There'd be no more children for a start: you couldn't have everyone living for ever and having kids, there'd be no room! The eternal generation would have to be the last. What arrogance and selfishness, to think you were so important that you had to be in the last ever generation of people, to think that you and your little life were so significant that they must never end! What a stale, boring place the world would become, with the same people with the same views and the same ideas destined to be in one another's company for ever!

Was the Professor right, Blossom wondered, doing what he was doing? _He_ thought he was right, _he_ believed in what he was doing. But was it enough, to think you were right? Did Mojo Jojo think _he_ was right, when he did the things he did? What was the difference? Why should the Professor's Right be any better than Mojo's? When the Professor developed the antidote to the terrible plague that struck Townsville some time ago, a plague that originated with the Amoeba Boys, that seemed like a good thing. Yet, if you thought about it, although the outcome of that had seemed right, the Professor had been no more justified in doing it than he had in trying to use Simon as a guinea pig. The outcome of one had been good, the other bad, but the motivation was the same in both cases. And the motivation originated in the same place in both cases: the Professor. He had decided, and everyone else had to live with the consequences. But then, wasn't that true of what she, Blossom did? What the Girls did? Did it make it right because people said it was right, because the people of Townsville were pleased with what they did? What if the girls did something Mojo was pleased with? Why should his approval be less important, less right, than anyone else's? Wasn't the truth really that everyone did what they thought was right, what they, personally, decided was right? The Professor had done a bad thing, but he thought it was right. The bank robber had done a bad thing, but he thought it was right. Blossom had done a bad, bad thing - but she had thought it was right.

Wasn't it the truth that all the bad things in the world were done by people that thought they were right? You don't do something if you think it's wrong, not if you _really_ think it's wrong.

The good things in the world were done by people who thought they were doing the right thing; so were the bad. The result, good or bad, was arbitrary, but the motivation was the same. The Professor, the Girls, Mojo: they all did the same thing. They saw something they didn't like and they tried to change it. There was no difference between them.

'Blossom.'

Pause.

'Blossom? Are you all right?' 

'Yes, I'm fine Bubbles.'

'It's lunch time.'

'Right.'

The three little girls left the classroom and leapt into the sky, heading back home for lunch. As they flew the short distance, Blossom fell back again, unable to summon much enthusiasm for the flight, indeed for anything. As she looked at Bubbles and Buttercup powering ahead, something struck her for the first time, a sudden and startling moment of clarity that made her feel she'd been walking around with her eyes closed. They were _freaks_, all of them. Just like Simon the monster, they were an accident, yet another of the Professor's _accidents_. She remembered the Professor's lab notes: take sugar, spice and everything nice - and _accidentally_ add Chemical X. The Professor hadn't even meant to create _them_. What had he been up to, she wondered? What had been the motivation behind that particular experiment? Because that's all they were, wasn't it, just an _experiment_? And that was what the Professor meant by a "proper present". He hadn't given her the book on Conversational Chinese because of that fellow-feeling she had imagined. He hadn't been trying to contact a similar soul, hadn't experienced that wonderful spark of recognition and all that other rubbish that she had convinced herself she had seen and felt at the time. It had just been another experiment, a test of her intelligence and personality. She looked again at her sisters, her eyes filling with tears. At any time they were everything to her, but here, now, she felt an overwhelming, fierce, intense love for them and simultaneously a dreadful sense of betrayal by the Professor. She applied an extra effort and caught up with Bubbles and Buttercup.

There was no sign of the Professor when they arrived home. Buttercup and Bubbles decided to fix themselves a snack, but eating was the last thing on Blossom's mind, so she went to sit in the quiet of the living room. After a few minutes, Bubbles came in carrying a plate of sandwiches and a glass of milk and sat beside her. The two sat in silence for a minute or two until, finally, Bubbles asked:

'Blossom, what's the matter?'

'Oh, nothing, Bubbles.' 

'Yes there is. Tell me.'

Blossom thought for a moment. Did she want to get into this? Did she want to involve her sisters in the pain she was feeling? Her heart sank at the thought, yet she had to talk to someone.

'I don't think what we've been doing is right,' she said.

'Killing... _It_?'

'Not just that. Everything.' 

Buttercup entered the room and sat with them.

'What do you mean, "Everything"?' asked Bubbles.

'Saving Townsville. Fighting monsters. That woman was right. What makes us think we're right to do that?'

'The Professor says...'

Bubbles voice trailed away.

'Well?'

Bubbles looked at the plate of sandwiches, resting in her lap.

'What are you two talking about?' asked Buttercup.

'Blossom thinks we've been doing the wrong thing,' replied Bubbles, quietly. 

'Not the wrong thing,' corrected Blossom, 'just not the right thing.'

'Isn't that the same?' asked Buttercup.

'I don't know,' replied Blossom.

'Why don't you ask the Professor?' said Buttercup.

Blossom and Bubbles looked at one another.

'Buttercup,' began Blossom, but before she could continue, the girls heard the door open and then close. After a minute or two, the Professor entered the room.

'Hello girls,' he said, 'I've just been for a walk.'

'You didn't come to the school then,' said Blossom, rather coldly.

'Er... No,' replied the Professor, avoiding eye contact with Blossom, 'Maybe this afternoon.'

The Professor turned to leave.

'Go on,' said Buttercup to Blossom.

'No,' replied Blossom, very quietly, hoping the Professor wouldn't hear.

'What's going on?' asked the Professor, with a slight smile, turning back again to face the girls.

'Blossom wants to ask you something,' said Buttercup, sensing that that was decidedly _not_ what Blossom wanted. 

The Professor looked rather awkwardly at Blossom.

'What's that, Blossom?' he asked.

'Nothing,' replied Blossom.

'Yes she does,' said Buttercup, 'She thinks we're doing everything wrong.'

'No I don't,' snapped Blossom.

'What do you mean, "everything wrong"?' asked the Professor, perplexed.

With the Professor and her sisters both looking at her, expectantly, Blossom was forced to answer.

'Fighting monsters,' she said, pointedly looking the Professor in the eye, 'helping people, fighting crime.'

'You think those things are wrong?'

'No. I just don't think they're... Right.'

Professor Utonium didn't really know what to say. He has always taken the girls' role in saving Townsville for granted. It was something that he had never stopped to analyse in all his researches. He wasn't a philosopher, and he had to dredge around to think of a suitable answer.

'Well, what would happen if you didn't do those things?'

'Townsville would be destroyed!' exclaimed Buttercup.

'Things would change,' replied Blossom.

The Professor, with no experience of handling such questions, was forced to think back to his own childhood to find some example that might help.

'Girls, have you ever heard the story of the Good Samaritan?'

'No,' they all replied.

'Well, er…' The Professor shuffled awkwardly. This wasn't an area he counted as part of his expertise. 'There was a man walking along the street...'

'In Townsville?' interrupted Bubbles.

'Anywhere. And some robbers attacked him and took his money and clothes and left him lying in the gutter. A businessman came along and saw him and thought "If I get involved I'll have to talk to the police and maybe go to court, and it will be a lot of trouble". So he crossed over the road and pretended not to see the man in the gutter. Then someone else came along and saw the man and thought "If I help him, maybe the robbers will attack me too", so he went to the other side of the street. Finally, someone came along who gave the man his coat and took him to the police and gave him some money so he could go home. Now, which of those people did the right thing? What would _you_ do?'

'Catch the robbers!' said Buttercup.

'Try and help him,' said Bubbles.

'Blossom?' queried the Professor.

Blossom considered the matter for a second or two. What _would_ she do? What sort of question was it, anyway?

'What if there wasn't anybody on the road?' she asked, eventually.

'What do you mean?'

'All these people keep going past. What if there weren't any?'

'Yes, but the question is, what would you do if you _were_ there?'

'But what if you _weren't_ there? What if no one was there?'

'I suppose the man might die,' replied Professor Utonium, who was growing very disturbed by this strange conversation.

'Yes, but you could _stop_ him dying,' said Bubbles.

'The robbers stopped him living,' said Blossom, 'or tried to.'

'So?' said Buttercup.

'So _they_ try to make the man die, _you_ try to make him live. What's the difference?'

'Well, surely that _is_ the difference?' replied the Professor.

'This is stupid!' exclaimed Buttercup.

'No it isn't!' snapped Blossom, fiercely, 'They both tried to do something to the man. It doesn't matter what they did: they both did it. What's the difference?'

Professor Utonium was shocked. Not by Blossom's odd logic, but by the fact that he had no satisfactory answer. Blossom was asking one of the most fundamental questions of human existence, and there was no equation he could point to, no law of physics that covered the subject. He realised abruptly that his parenting skills left something to be desired. It was Buttercup who replied.

'Like the Professor said, one was right and one was wrong.'

'Who decides?'

'Well, how would _you_ like it if you were left in the gutter and no one helped?'

'I wouldn't,' replied Blossom, 'but what's liking got to do with it? Criminals don't _like_ what we do to them. Does that make it right or wrong?'

The momentary silence that followed this question was broken by the sound of the hotline phone. For second, no one moved or spoke.

'Are you going to answer that?' asked Professor Utonium.

Blossom was staring at the floor. Buttercup and Bubbles looked at one another.

'I'll get it,' said Buttercup and darted across the room in a flash. 'Townsville is in trouble again!' she exclaimed as she slammed the phone down.

Bubbles stood up, ready for action. Blossom didn't move. She was looking at the Professor with a startled expression on her face. _Right or Wrong?_

'Come on, Blossom, for crying out loud!' shouted Buttercup.

Blossom glanced at Buttercup and stood up.

'I'm coming,' she said.

'At last!' said Buttercup.

Blossom looked at the Professor again. Staring blankly back at her, he didn't seem to have any answers to the questions that were coursing through her head.

'Goodbye, Professor,' she said, finally.

The three girls blasted out through the window in a bright, multi-coloured flash.

Resolute as ever, Buttercup led the way to the scene of the action. Bubbles followed. But when Buttercup glanced behind her, Blossom was nowhere to be seen.

Blossom circled over a familiar building. It was rather different from when she had last been here. There were people here now, men in hard hats whistling and shouting, radios blaring out. The tall crane that was bolted to the side of the building was lifting a great hopper of concrete high into the air. Outside the building site, on the wide paved path that ran by the river, stood a single figure, right by the concrete wall at the waters edge, looking out at the buildings on the other bank. Blossom cruised over to land gently by his side. For a moment, she looked over too, to see if she could see what the man was looking at. She floated up onto the concrete parapet and peered over to watch the grey-green water swirling around the enormous corrugations of the steel piles that supported the quay side. 

If only she were ordinary. If she were just a normal, ordinary little girl, she could jump, and the silty, oily water could take her down and away for ever. Then, perhaps, she would be rid of this terrible ache, this awful, hollowed-out emptiness, the feeling that her chest was about to implode under the tightening iron grip of loneliness. She thought of Bubbles and Buttercup and looked away. Turning, she glanced up at the man standing by her side. It was Mr. Matthews.

'Hi,' said Blossom, softly, 'I guessed you'd be here.'


	11. Part 11

Part 11

Mr Matthews turned his head to look down at the little figure of Blossom standing by his side. He pulled the heavy scarf down from around his mouth, revealing the grinning, saturnine face of _Him_.

'You knew it was me, didn't you?' he said.

'It just came to me, a few minutes ago,' replied Blossom.

'You're very clever.'

'Hopkin I. Matthews. H.I.M. Very cute! You were taking a chance, weren't you?'

'Just my little game. There has to be some risk, otherwise it's not worth playing.'

Him looked across the river again and Blossom followed his gaze. For a few moments, they stood in silence. Finally, Him turned to the little girl again.

'It's cold today,' he said, 'shall we go somewhere warmer?'

Blossom continued to look at the frigid water that seemed now almost to be mocking her with its swirls and bubbles. She thought of the Professor, of Pokey Oaks and Ms Keane, of her sisters. For second or two the many fights that she had had with Mojo, Princess, Fuzzy, the Gangreen Gang, the whole rotten lot of them, flitted through her mind, along with the battles she had had with the terrible monsters that had attacked Townsville. Funny how that all seemed so long ago now. Funny how something that had seemed so important, so all-consuming, could cease so abruptly to have any hold on her.

Where did feelings go, she wondered? Of what value were they, if one so overwhelmingly significant could vanish like the ace in a cheap card trick?

'All right,' she replied, at length.

Him muttered something under his breath and at once Blossom became conscious of a strange sensation overtaking her. Her head started to swim slightly and she began to feel curiously detached from her surroundings, as if she were watching them on TV. For a moment, everything around her seemed unnaturally bright and clear, vivid in a peculiar, artificial way that she had never experienced before, and then, slowly, a terrible tiredness seemed to creep in behind her eyes, making her struggle to focus. She tried to blink the feeling away, but the buildings and the river became progressively hazier and greyer until she could see no more, and it seemed as if she were standing in the midst of a dense, impenetrable fog. Then, as quickly as it had arrived, the fog began to clear and some shapes began to be visible, formless at first, but gradually defining themselves. A great, grey rectangle looming over her gradually took on the shape of a house. Windows and a huge, black door became visible. After just a few moments the mist cleared, and Blossom found herself standing before the steps that led up to Him's enormous, bleak house.

Him was himself still standing by Blossom's side.

'Shall we go in?' he asked, gesturing to the front door. As Blossom watched, a tiny, vertical sliver of light appeared along one side of the door, widening as the door opened. It was soft and cosily warm, beckoning them in from the grey day and the pervasive, damp smell of decaying vegetation.

Him led the way up the steps and Blossom floated after him. The huge front door was fully open now, and revealed a great, wide hallway, its floor of green marble and lit by the rays from innumerable lamps gently reflecting from dark green walls. Blossom paused on the threshold. There _was_ something inviting about the space framed in that doorway, yet the act of entering the house was more than merely crossing a line, it was a statement. She hovered at the entrance, looking in, her eyes sparkling at the wonders within, and Him stood just inside the door, waiting patiently with a slight smile on his face.

The great passageway was filled with treasures. Spaced at regular intervals along the length of it were white marble statues, possibly Greek or Roman originals, whilst from the walls hung innumerable paintings. The vaulted ceiling was painted with an expertise that would have done justice to the Sistine Chapel. At the far end, a huge, dark staircase carpeted in blood red ascended, pausing half way on its journey to the next floor to form a wide landing, from which two separate stairways split off, one to the left and one to the right. Everything was so clean, so ordered, so _rational_. The mind that had created this space was clearly sophisticated, detached, and cool.

Blossom entered the house, and the great front door, seemingly of its own volition, closed behind her.

Him took off his heavy overcoat and scarf and hung them on a carved wooden coat stand that stood just inside the door. He turned to the little girl and with a wave of his claw invited her to follow him.

Between some of the statues, there were display cases containing a tantalising array of objects and curios, scrolls and ancient parchments. Him glanced back with a wry smile at the fascination in Blossom's darting eyes as she passed each of these cases, straining to catch a glimpse of the treasures they contained, but he did not slow down to permit her a closer look.

'All these things…' was all Blossom could say.

'There are some things here that would upset more than a few people, were they ever to see light of day,' laughed Him, 'People will kill one another for the sake of history, or what they think is history, yet History resides in such fragile, ephemeral, _easily mislaid_ objects as these.'

He continued to lead the way along the lengthy hallway, but as they approached the bottom of the great staircase, he beckoned Blossom over to a large panelled door in the left-hand wall. This he opened and gestured for the little girl to enter.

Blossom let out a gasp of awe. The room that she had entered was decorated in a stunning daffodil yellow. The walls, the ceiling, the stained glass at the window, all radiated a gorgeous summer light that banished all thought of the cold winter's day outside. On a table in the centre of the room, a spray of white lilies complemented the effect. 

'It's beautiful,' she said, 'I never thought that...'

She stopped, in a confusion of thoughts.

'Go on. You were saying?' replied Him.

'I don't know... I didn't mean to offend you...'

'You cannot offend me, Blossom. Say what you mean.'

'I was going to say... I didn't think that anyone so evil could live in such a beautiful room.'

Him laughed.

'Evil, Blossom?'

Him paused and directed a piercing stare at the little girl.

'What _is_ Evil?' he asked.

Blossom did not reply.

'You don't know, do you, my child? That's why you're here, isn't it, to find out? Except that there's nothing _to_ find out. You see, you've been blinded all your life by people you trusted, people you've believed. They want you to see things _their_ way, Blossom, but now, for the first time, you're looking away from them and opening your eyes to the world. _I_ am opening your eyes, Blossom. Because that is all that the thing they label "Evil" is. It is opening your eyes to the reality of the world. Don't be afraid of a name. Don't close your eyes because someone tells you something is "evil". Look at it, see it for what it is. Look beyond the label. That's all I ask of my followers. Look about you. See the world as it really is. Live in the real world.'

'Your _followers_? Is that what you want me to be?'

'I never ask anyone to follow me, Blossom. My followers come to _me_. I never go to them. All I do is open their eyes.'

Blossom considered. She certainly did feel that her eyes had been opened. Over the last few days she had seen things more clearly than ever before. She had seen details that she had previously overlooked, questioned things that she had always taken for granted.

'_Blossom, don't do this_,' said the Professor.

Go Away, thought Blossom. What do _you_ know about good and evil? Go tell it to Simon. Go tell Buttercup she murdered her brother. Go experiment on someone else for a change.

Him stared at her. She was confused. She felt she was on the spot, that there was a roomful of eyes watching her and she couldn't answer.

'But… there _are_ good things,' she said, frowning, 'There can't be evil things without good ones.'

'What have I told you?' asked Him, softly, settling himself comfortably in a plush, gold-upholstered armchair, 'Look beyond labels. Tell me something that is "good". If you show me something that is Good, then I will show you Evil.'

Blossom was silent.

'Saving Townsville?' asked Him, 'Is that good?'

Blossom hardly needed to consider that question: it had been on her mind now for days. Good for whom? There were two sides to every story. She'd never stopped to think about the monsters she'd destroyed, about _their_ side. Not until Simon. She'd been too interested in lapping up the adulation of the people of Townsville to notice.

'It _is_ good...' she replied, frowning, trying to think, 'but...'

'It's also bad? You see, it's not really good, it's not really evil. These are illusions. Cast them aside.'

'But it can't be good, to destroy the city, to kill people?'

'In the world of labels, just because something isn't bad, it's not necessarily good, is it? And so if something isn't good that doesn't make it bad, does it? Blossom, you are a very clever little girl. Free your mind from these outdated ideas. They are for children and the simple only.'

'I _am_ a child,' replied Blossom. She realised with a start what a shocking thing that simple truth was. All her life she had tried to be something else, tried to live up to some confused image of what she thought other people – _the Professor_ – wanted her to be. "Little Miss Bossy Boots" as Buttercup often put it.

'You are much more,' said Him, 'You have a keen mind. Cast aside these ridiculous concepts of Good and Evil and a universe of knowledge can be yours.'

Him smiled beguilingly.

'You know, you're not alone in wondering about these things. The whole world wants answers to these questions. Right and Wrong, Good and Bad: people desperately want answers, want guidance in their lives. But the real truth is, that the questions they ask are meaningless. You're beginning to see that now, aren't you? You're beginning to _feel_ it. Professor Utonium knows it, too, in a superficial, childish sort of way. He knows that you cannot understand the world unless you throw away these pointless notions. That's so, isn't it?' 

It was true. The Professor was prepared to risk anything in the pursuit of knowledge. That was clear.

'The Professor knows that in order to truly understand, you must relinquish all ideas of Right and Wrong. A true scientist, a true seeker after enlightenment, cannot allow his vision to be distorted by such preconceived ideas. And, remember, knowledge is always regarded with suspicion by the "moral" and "righteous", because it destroys. You see, knowledge necessarily destroys what came before.'

Him paused momentarily.

'You want to _know_, don't you, Blossom?' he continued, with a rather crafty smile playing around his lips.

'Didn't one of the ancient Greeks think that knowledge itself was good?' asked Blossom, remembering a half-understood entry in her encyclopaedia.

'Are you thinking perhaps of Socrates? If you have all of the facts at your disposal, know all that there is to know about a particular situation or circumstance, then you will necessarily do the "right thing". That was, in essence, his argument, I believe. Yes, his was what we might call a _sophisticated_ argument, in the fullest sense of the term. He was redefining "good" to mean what he wanted it to mean.'

'So... Is knowledge good or bad?'

'Tut! You're not listening, are you? It's neither. You can only truly have it if you dispense with such concepts.'

'But if it's not good, or even bad, what's the use of having it?'

'Come, come, Blossom. Let's have no beating about the bush. Open your eyes! You think I haven't seen you at school, showing off your spelling, your arithmetic, your reading and writing? And you ask, what use is it?'

Blossom suddenly felt very ashamed. She looked down at the floor and floated rather sadly to one of the opulent armchairs, where she sat perched on the edge, her little legs far from the floor.

'I _do_ show off,' she said.

'Come with me and you can show off to the _world_, not just to a class of stupid kids,' said Him, 'Come with me and the glories of mathematics and science and nature can be revealed to you. Stay as you are, with childish ideas of Morality, and you can never experience these things, not and remain true to your ideals. For no knowledge can be guaranteed not to be misused, for so-called good _or_ evil.'

Blossom could not deny that what Him said was true. How many horrors had been perpetrated in the pursuit of knowledge? How many ways had knowledge been perverted? As she had heard so many times from the Professor, once something is learnt it cannot be un-learnt, once invented it cannot be un-invented. If something _can_ be done, you may be sure that it _will_ be done.

'You're right,' she said.

'You see, that is Reality,' said Him, 'Now you see it.'

'I _do_ show off,' continued Blossom, slowly, 'But if you can't use your knowledge to help people, because you might hurt them, then there's nothing else to do with it, other than show it off.'

'That's right!' exclaimed Him, with a broad grin, 'Now you've got it!'

'Buttercup hates it,' said Blossom, thinking of the times she had argued with her sister.

'Buttercup!' laughed Him, 'What's _she_ doing now?'

He looked towards the corner of the room, where there stood a TV set that Blossom had not previously noticed. As Him glanced at it, the TV turned on. A news bulletin was being broadcast. Stanley Whitfield, front man for the local station, was reading a news flash. 

'This just in,' he said in his usual, earnest manner, 'It seems that Townsville may be about to experience its worst ever disaster. The Powerpuff Girls, who we've relied on so many times to save us from destruction, seem to have split. Only Buttercup and Bubbles were on hand this afternoon when Mojo Jojo unleashed his latest diabolical scheme. Fighting is still underway, but so far every attempt by the two remaining Powerpuff Girls to defeat the evil monkey has resulted in failure. Two Puffs, it seems, aren't enough. Already, Mojo has faxed a list of demands to the Mayor, and it seems almost inevitable that we will have to resign ourselves to rule by Townsville's most celebrated villain. Blossom, if you're out there and can hear us, please come back, we need you!'

The picture vanished. The set had turned itself off.

'Poor Buttercup,' grinned Him, 'She and Bubbles can't get by without you.'

Blossom held her head in despair.

'Buttercup…' she said, 'I should be… helping her.'

'Well,' replied Him, still grinning, 'She needs you. Why don't you go to her. _I'm_ not stopping you.'

Tears welled up in Blossom's eyes.

'I don't know what to do,' she sobbed.

'You want to help Buttercup, don't you, but Buttercup wants to destroy Mojo. _You_ don't want to destroy Mojo, do you? Not any more.'

'I don't _know_!' wailed Blossom.

'But you can answer this question rationally, can't you? What will happen if Mojo loses this fight?'

'He'll be put in jail,' replied Blossom, wiping her eyes.

'And if Mojo wins?'

'I… I don't really know. Everyone will have to do what he tells them.'

'So, you might say that, in a way, _Townsville_ will be put in jail, mightn't you?'

'I suppose,' said Blossom, uncertainly.

'So what we have here is just a question of whether Mojo goes to jail or Townsville goes to jail. Not really much to choose between them, is there? Certainly not worth you getting into a fight about, surely?'

'But…'

'Yes?'

'But Mojo's cruel and horrible and will do horrible things to people.'

'And won't horrible things happen to him, if he's put in jail?'

'Yes. Well, I mean, maybe. But I don't… _want_ them to…'

'Oh, now, Blossom,' interrupted Him, waving his finger mockingly at the little girl, his face one broad smile, 'Surely this isn't all just about what _you_ want?'

Blossom looked at Him.

'But it is, isn't it?' he continued, seemingly fighting to contain a smile that threatened to burst out of his face entirely, 'It's about what _you_ want, what Mojo wants, what Buttercup wants, what the Mayor wants, the Professor… Who's to say which of you should get your way? Maybe everyone should. No, that's not really possible is it? Perhaps no-one, then? Well, that's difficult too.'

Him leant forward conspiratorially, captivating Blossom's enormous pink eyes with his own sly yellow ones.

'There is a way of resolving all this, clearing up this silly problem of who's right and who's wrong, giving everyone the spiritual and moral guidance that they crave. You know what it's like to feel that yearning, don't you, Blossom? Well then, someone who's _beyond_ right and wrong can _decide_ what's right and what's wrong.'

'Meaning _you_, I suppose,' said Blossom.

Him put his claw to his chest in a gesture of shock.

'_Me_, Blossom,' he said, in a tone of outrage, 'What _do_ you take me for?'

He relaxed back comfortably into his chair, and looked at Blossom with a rather cool, appraising glance.

'How old are you, Blossom?' he asked.

'Seven,' she replied.

'You have been alive for seven years. And have you changed in those seven years? Have you grown any older?'

Blossom thought about it. Him was right. She and Bubbles and Buttercup were the same now as at the moment they had blasted into existence in the Professor's underground lab.

'Seven years,' continued Him, 'and you've not changed. Physically, mentally… or emotionally. You've been held back, Blossom. You're never going to grow old physically, but your _mind_ – that's a different thing. Some things can change there. The Professor, your sisters, this pathetic little backwater you live in, they've all conspired to keep you in the dark. But now you're beginning to see the light. _I'm beginning to show you the light_. Remember – just open your eyes. Shake off these _little people_. Only when you've done that can you reach your true potential. The world needs "moral" leadership, it needs spiritual guidance: you know that now. Who better than you, with your powers, your brain and the limitless potential unleashed by the unshackling of your mind, to provide that leadership? Nothing will be beyond you. The world is at your feet Blossom. You need no longer be constrained by Townsville and its puny denizens. The scale of your life will be _global_. What pathetic figures like Mojo Jojo can only dream about can be yours with scarcely an effort.'

Him's eyes glowed red.

'I could say, you could be a god, Blossom. But that is a laughable idea. In a few human generations, you will be **GOD**!'


	12. Part 12

Part 12

'It's a fine view, isn't it?'

All of Townsville, its lights already twinkling under the leaden sky, seemed encompassed by the wave of Him's claw. A cold wind plucked at the curtains by the open door, pulling them out onto the balcony to wave and flutter like mocking ghosts.

'Do you like the view, Blossom?'

Him was not looking at Townsville when he said these words. In fact, he had his back to the city. Blossom didn't answer. Her head hurt.

'This is your chance, Blossom. You won't get another like it. Time for you to grow up, time for you to stop doing other people's work for them. _You_ can decide now. Think about it for a minute. Think of what you can do.'

Something wasn't right in all this. What Him said made sense, sort of. Yes, she _had_ been constrained by what she thought was the right thing to do, by that constant desire to live up to some half-formed ideal of behaviour, an ideal that had been shaped and informed by what she now knew was a poor, warped template: the Professor. Why _should_ she be held back by that? Yet something didn't work in this vision, something she couldn't quite grasp.

Blossom looked at Him, smiling so sweetly as he leant against the stone balustrade of the balcony. Did he really believe in her? He wasn't joking, there was no hint of humour or deceit in his eyes, just an arrogant look of victory. It seemed he really believed in what he was saying, really believed she had that awesome potential. The prospect he offered her was vast, overwhelming, and yet, strangely, simultaneously meaningless. It wasn't the picture that he painted before her that made her feel giddy, made her head ache, it was the way he was treating her. Sitting there quietly, speaking to her as an adult, treating her like an equal. It was a form of respect she had not anticipated and it was shocking. It didn't seem to matter what he said, what he offered, just that he was here, now, saying it to her. It made her feel as if she'd grown ten feet tall. It made her feel like... like...

It made her feel like she did when the Professor had given her her Christmas present. It made her feel like she did when she rattled off pages of flowing prose to the class at Pokey Oaks, after the faltering attempts of her classmates at spelling out the words painfully one by one, keeping their place on the page with their fingers.

'You could feel like that all the time,' said Him, with a knowing smile.

She wished he wouldn't do that, try to anticipate her thoughts, pretend that he understood her innermost feelings. It irritated her. She hated to be thought of as predictable, as just like anyone else. She was Blossom, she was herself, unique. She hated that smug smile, that piercing stare under heavy eyelids. It suddenly annoyed her that he thought he had got her, a little fly caught in his web. She wasn't a puppet to be manipulated by his saccharine words.

'Maybe I _could_ do it,' she snapped, 'Maybe I could get rid of all the _evil_ in the world. Maybe I could get rid of all the wars and all the criminals and make people live happily with each other.'

'Yes!' exclaimed Him, his eyes glowing red, 'That's right. You could do those things. You could make the world a beautiful place. No more wars, no more crime. Everyone living happily ever after.'

Blossom looked at him, puzzled. She had snapped the words in irritation, yet Him seemed to have misunderstood their intention. He smiled.

'Let's go inside again,' he said. 

As they descended the stairs, Blossom was lost in a confusion of thoughts. Could it really be that she, and the others, had misunderstood Him all this time? Had they merely mistaken his knowledge, his understanding of the ways of the world, for evil? _Cynical_, the Professor had called Buttercup when she had demonstrated that she understood some of the ways of the world; yet, one meaning of 'cynical' was simply sceptical, as Blossom had found when she had looked it up in the dictionary. Being sceptical surely wasn't bad; knowing the ways of people, having eyes open to the reality of the world – had they mistaken these things for evil, been persecuting Him for all the wrong reasons? But then, not long ago, he had tried to make all the citizens of Townsville hate Blossom and her sisters. He had forced the Girls to hurt their loved ones in order to break the spell that he had placed over them. It didn't make any sense.

They entered the yellow room again. It was so beautiful, such a contrast to the cold wind and the low grey clouds that had covered Townsville. It raised Blossom's spirits for an instant. How odd that someone like Him should have a room like this! It was a thought that had occurred to her when she had first entered his house. She had always imagined that he must live in…

Of course! _That_ was what was wrong!

The shock of revelation must have been evident on Blossom's face, for Him turned reflexively to look at her, and for the first time she saw, just for a fraction of a second, a similar look of surprise and confusion pass over his face. He glanced away quickly, and when he turned to look at her again his features had relaxed into their customary knowing, half-mocking expression. He sat down again oh-so-slowly and expansively in one of the big armchairs, and beckoned Blossom to follow suit, but it was a sharp and intense look that he directed at her from beneath his superciliously half-closed eyelids.

Him opened his mouth to speak, but Blossom interrupted.

'Good and evil don't exist. That's right, isn't it?' she said. She smiled at Him, the first genuine smile that had appeared on her face for days.

'That's right,' Him replied, with another smile, 'You see, now you're…'

'Or are they _just the same_?' interrupted Blossom again.

'The same?' There was no disguising the note of irritation in Him's voice, the flicker of annoyance in his eyes. 'What do…'

'I love this room,' interrupted Blossom a third time. Her heart was pounding, her mind racing with thoughts that seemed to have been bottled up for days only suddenly, now, to burst forth like water through a broken dam. It was here, all the time, in this room! She floated slowly to the window, then to the fireplace, then over to one of the walls, all the while admiring the décor and forcing Him to twist and turn in his chair to follow her with his eyes. 'It's a lovely, pretty colour,' she continued, 'Bubbles would love a room like this!'

'But we weren't talking about the room, were we?' said Him, in an emollient tone that could not quite cover the hard edge to his words, 'We were talking about you, your future.'

'Oh yes,' replied Blossom, 'How I'm going to rid the world of evil and make everyone live happily ever after!'

'If you like. Of course, I didn't actually suggest that…'

'No, you're right. You didn't _actually_ suggest that.'

Blossom sat in the armchair opposite Him, and smiled again. She was shaking with excitement, with the effort of repressing words that threatened to spill uncontrollably from her mouth.

'Good and evil are just the same thing aren't they?' she asked, as calmly as she could.

'I…'

'Oh, you didn't _actually_ say that either, did you?' interrupted Blossom again, 'But you've shown me that's true. Here, anyway. You know, your garden is very ugly. All those dead leaves, and those rattly brown stalks that used to be flowers. You ought to get a gardener.'

'My _garden_?' exclaimed Him, his eyes briefly flashing red. With a visible effort that made Blossom smile all the more, he regained his composure. 'Blossom,' he continued in a sickly tone, 'you're probably tired. I've given you a lot to think about, and I've been very inconsiderate. I expect you usually have a little nap about this time in the afternoon.'

'Oh, I'm not tired,' said Blossom, brightly, 'In fact, I feel quite wide awake. I expect it's this lovely, sunny room. It's lovely and warm in here, and horrible and grey outside.'

'Yes, yes, so you keep saying. Really, Blossom, I thought you were more grown-up than this. We've got important matters to discuss, and the fact that this room is a _pretty_ _colour_ really is a subject I would expect to discuss with your sister Bubbles, not you.'

'Ah, but Bubbles would like your garden,' replied Blossom, 'Even though the pretty flowers are all dead – or maybe there never were any pretty flowers? – she'd still find things to draw, and little animals to talk to! And Buttercup would like it too, because it's all dark and gloomy and moody and she'd love to play there. And that's why Bubbles and Buttercup aren't here, and I am.'

Him was silent, unmoving, his mouth a thin, hard line across his face, his arms crossed, staring coldly and intently at the little girl who sat smiling at him from the recesses of the big armchair opposite. The game was over.

'Because it's _your_ garden, isn't it, and _your_ room,' continued Blossom, 'One's cold and dark and one's warm and light, but they're both _yours_. I thought your house would be dark and mean, and I thought you'd hate the light and pretty things, but you don't mind, do you? They're all the same to you. And when I said to you I never thought someone so evil could appreciate beauty, you told me there's no such thing as good and evil. But that was a lie, wasn't it? You had to say that, to stop me thinking about it. You don't believe there's no good and no evil: you just believe they're two sides of the same thing. And you thought you'd get me to believe it, too. Try to do good, and what happens? Sometimes it turns out to be bad. And, I guess, sometimes bad things turn out to be good. The Professor did a bad thing to Simon, but he's done lots of good things since, and he's learnt his lesson…'

'And that makes it all right, does it?' interjected Him, trying his best to restore his sugary smile but succeeding merely in contorting his face into a sneer.

'Don't pretend _you_ care about Simon,' replied Blossom, 'but I know the Professor does, and I'm sure it's changed him.'

'But he still did a _bad_ thing, Blossom, I know you think so.'

'Yes, it's all muddled up,' said Blossom, sadly, looking down at the vivid Art Deco pattern of the carpet, her smile disappearing for a moment as she reflected on the events that had brought her here. She looked up at Him once more. 'I don't know if I'll ever be able to be the same way with the Professor any more. I don't understand what he did or why he did it, and I don't know whether what he did was really right or really wrong: maybe there isn't an absolute Good or an absolute Bad you can measure things against. But I do know this now: it suits _you_ that's it's all muddled up. Because if good and evil are just the same thing, then the only way to avoid doing evil is to do _nothing at all_. I can see now that's what I've been thinking, underneath, all along. Why do anything, if good things keep turning out to be bad? You'd like that, wouldn't you? People doing nothing? Because that's just a living death, and that's what you feed on.'

'I can't see anyone _really_ doing nothing, can you?' replied Him in a weary, disdainful tone.

'Oh no? "People want guidance". That's what you said, they want to be told what's right and what's wrong. That's true. But there isn't a formula for good and evil. You can't say, "do that, and you'll be good". It's not that simple: _you taught me that._ Wanting to be good, trying to do the right thing, trying to live in some sort of harmony with other people and the world around you: those aren't passive things, they aren't about just following a rule book, being told what to do so you don't have to think about it – _that's just the same as doing nothing_. They're things you've got to _want to_ _do_, and things you've got to think out and work out with other people, and learn for yourself. And, yes, I suppose that means that people will always go wrong and make mistakes, and other people have to try and live with that and pick up the pieces. Maybe it means there'll be bad things in the world and some people won't live happily ever after, but at least we can _try_ and do our best, and not just roll over and die in the name of an easy life. It's called _being alive_, and being human people, not gods.'

All the words seemed to tumble from her mouth unbidden. Where the inspiration had come from, Blossom could not say: maybe from all those nights agonising over what she and her sisters had been doing; maybe from the tears she had shed over losing _her_ Professor; maybe from the tears she had shed _for_ her Professor.

The last word dropped into a stony silence. The smile had gone from Him's face. So had the supercilious expression, the languorous pose, the half-closed eyelids. In their place was a snarl, a curled lip, and a sneer.

'I see,' he said, the muscles of his face twitching with anger and contempt, 'So you have to learn and make mistakes, do you? Well learn _THIS_!'

As he roared the last word, he flung out a claw and the television set in the corner once again sprang into life. On the screen, Bubbles and Buttercup were still engaged in combat against some diabolical mechanical contraption of Mojo Jojo's.

'There: your sisters!' screamed Him, his body shaking with maniacal frenzy, 'Not doing too well are they? In trouble. Tiring. I have only to intervene now, and they're _finished_!'

Again, Him roared out the final word, his eyes red with fury.

'I give you a lesson to learn in your new-found morality, Blossom,' he continued, his voice hoarse with barely suppressed anger, 'Bubbles or Buttercup. Which is it to be? I give you the choice. Whichever one you choose I shall kill. You choose – or else I kill them both!'

Blossom recoiled in horror from the scene of battle shown on the screen. Bubbles was caught in some sort of mechanical pincer, Buttercup being forced back by some form of ray gun. They were both tiring. They had been fighting for – how long? How long had she been here, listening to Him's lies and deception? For how long had she deserted them?

'Don't imagine that attacking me will save your sisters,' crowed Him, 'Touch me and they both die! Make up your mind: Bubbles or Buttercup. Quickly. Painful, isn't it, _being alive_?'

What could she do? She had upset Him with her fine words, but fine words were valueless, powerless to help her sisters.

'So, Blossom, what's the right thing to do? Better make a choice. At least you can save one of your sisters. Which is it to be? Better think about their qualities. Who do you love the most? Who's going to be the most valuable? _Who's going to forgive you the most readily_?'

'Buttercup!' screamed Bubbles.

'I… can't… get free,' panted Buttercup, exhausted.

Blossom buried her face in her arms.

'Quite a dilemma,' chuckled Him, 'You know, if you don't hurry, they might both just die anyway. You see, I could even end up _saving_ one of them. What irony!'

Blossom tried to muffle the sound of Bubbles' screams with her arms, but her sister's pain was communicated to her by more direct means than mere senses. She could _feel_ Bubbles' pain, just as she could feel the drain of Buttercup's flagging energies.

'This is _your_ responsibility Blossom. You have the choice. If you want to grope your own way through your pathetic morality, then now's the chance. It's all down to you.' Him laughed triumphantly.

The serrated claws of Mojo's machine were biting into her arms, into Bubbles' arms. The pressure in her head was intolerable, it felt like her teeth were being pushed out from the inside. There was blood in Bubbles' eyes.

It was over. For a moment she had thought that she had escaped Him, even imagined that she had some power over him, but she could see that he still had her. There was no way out, no right solution. She was trapped, trapped by an inexorable logic of evil.

__

Trapped…

Blossom looked up.

'No,' she exclaimed, shaking her head, 'It's _your_ responsibility. Whatever happens, happens because _you_ want it to. You say, choose which one has to die. I say, choose to let them live. You told me when I got here I was trapped by my ideas of right and wrong and good and evil. Well, maybe, but you're trapped too, and more than I ever was. I say, let them both live – _but you can't, can you_? You're more trapped by your evil than I ever was by morality. I may go wrong sometimes, but you can _never_ go right. Didn't someone say that evil was banal? Now I know what they mean.'

Him continued to laugh. Bubbles screamed again, and a searing pain shot through Blossom's head. No! She had to focus! She was right, it wasn't her responsibility, Him had the power. She mustn't accept his warped way of looking at things

__

Bubbles, stop! I can't think! I can't help you if I can't think!

They think it makes them tough, having nothing to lose. But it doesn't. It just means they've got nothing to live for. That's so sad, it seems like punishment enough.

__

Only you could feel sad for the Gangreen Gang, Bubbles!

God, she must be going mad! What a stupid thing to think of now! She'd failed. For her own selfish, conceited reasons she'd left Bubbles and Buttercup to fight Mojo without her. Him was right: it _was_ her responsibility. She had put them there. Against Mojo, they might still hold their own, but against Him too, they had no chance. And she was right again: he _would_ do it, he would kill them, because he couldn't do anything else; he was as trapped by his own evil as any of them. And that _was_ sad. How stupid, to feel sorry for Him!

Something strange had happened. Blossom sensed it, through the pain, some change in the light. Through the blur of tears she could see that the room looked different, not so bright any more. She blinked hard. What was that on the walls? Wallpaper? A sort of green flock wallpaper? She hadn't noticed that before. But it wasn't a pattern: it was a stain, an ugly, green, slimy, spreading stain.

Confused, Blossom looked at Him. He seemed transfixed, staring through her, his claw still outstretched towards the TV set. _The TV set_! Horror swept over Blossom like an icy wave as she looked at the set again. There was no picture there! In its place was a gaping hole, an evil, unfathomable blackness that seemed to hang in the air like a rent in space itself, like the entrance to another world. 

Had he done it? Had he killed them? The shock, the horror, the pain rose inside her, an irresistible pressure bursting inside her head_. If he'd hurt them, if he'd touched them_…! But no! They were still alive, she could sense them, Bubbles and Buttercup, still fighting, still holding on. She looked at Him again. He was still motionless, his arm still outstretched, and as she looked into his eyes, strangely flat and lifeless, she realised with a jolt that she didn't feel angry with him; this anger wasn't about him, it was about _her_, about her selfishness and self-pity, about putting her own petty conscience and personal satisfaction ahead of everyone she loved. She wasn't angry with Him, she was angry and ashamed with herself. If anything, she almost felt grateful to him, for opening her eyes to what she had become.

There was a flicker of movement in Him's face. Blossom looked at him and caught a glimpse of… What? Something in his eyes, those crafty, insinuating, knowing eyes. Except that they weren't knowing and crafty now: if anything was written there now, it was bewilderment, a wide-eyed incomprehension that seemed to have taken the light out of them.

There was an enormous crash from outside the room that shattered Blossom's thoughts. She looked around, suddenly aware that her teeth were chattering. The room was freezing cold, a cutting draught blowing through the broken panes of the window. She could see daylight through the ceiling. 

'What's happening?' she asked, dazedly, but when she looked across again to where Him had been sitting there was nothing to be seen except a pile of charred timber. 

'Hey! What are you doing in there?'

The voice came from behind her. Blossom turned, to see an elderly man peering in through the window.

'This ain't a playground, you know,' said the man.

Blossom looked at him blankly.

'It's _dangerous_,' he said, leaning further through the window to emphasise his words, 'Place should've been torn down years ago, after the fire. Go on, get off home!'

Almost without thinking, in a sort of automatic deference to an adult, Blossom leapt into the sky, much to the old man's evident astonishment. When she looked down, she could scarcely see Him's house, just a few broken down walls and blackened timbers overgrown with weeds and shrubs.

-oOo-

'Now I have you, little Powerpuffs! Scream all you like, but you cannot escape. I, Mojo Jojo have defeated you. You are beaten, and it is I, Mojo Jojo that is victorious. Now that you are beaten…'

The citizens of Townsville never heard the remainder of Mojo Jojo's typically verbose victory speech, for at that moment the sky was split in two by a lightning flash of pink that grounded on his robot destruction machine, hurling it off its feet and causing it to crash drunkenly into the side of a nearby office building, bringing a horrifying shower of glass down onto the sidewalk beneath. Mojo's ray gun veered crazily skyward, releasing Buttercup from its stupefying power, whilst the monstrous grip of the claw slackened sufficiently to allow Bubbles just enough movement to smash the pincers into a dozen fragments.

Blossom was floating a little way off, watching her sisters. Much as she wanted to go to them, hug them, try, somehow, to tell them how much she loved them, she was yet afraid. Afraid of what they would say, afraid that she could never atone for leaving them.

The two freed girls darted over to where Blossom was floating.

'Blossom!' exclaimed Bubbles, rushing up and hugging her sister tightly, 'We've been worried about you!'

Tears welled up in Blossom's eyes. _They_ were worried about _her_!

'Yeah, where've you been?' asked a frowning Buttercup, gently taking hold of Blossom's arm, 'We've been to Hell and back here!'

'Funny you should say that,' smiled Blossom, wiping her eyes. 'Just a minute,' she continued, 'There's still Mojo to deal with.'

The force of the crash had thrown Mojo from his cabin inside the robot out onto the road. He was now sitting with his hands in the air, looking down the barrels of a dozen automatic weapons held by police marksmen and surrounded by a hostile crowd that was jeering and cursing. Blossom floated down into the middle of this melée.

'You've done a bad thing, Mojo,' she said.

'I know,' replied Mojo, rather humbly. He flinched a little as Blossom walked over to stand right by him.

'Yes, you really do, don't you?' replied Blossom with a broad smile. With that, she promptly kissed him on the cheek and, with a giggle, rocketed into the sky, leaving an astonished crowd and an astonished Mojo behind her.

Blossom paused when she reached her sisters, who were staring at her wide-eyed and open-mouthed.

'Come on, let's go home,' she said, 'I've got to tell the Professor what I want for Christmas.'

THE END


End file.
